Walkabout

Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) was the former cinematographer's first solo feature as director, and it established the hypnotic, fragmentary visual style that would mark his career. Competing at Cannes, it took a slender survival story and transformed it into a sensuous meditation on nature, civilisation and the gulf between cultures.

Jenny Agutter plays the English schoolgirl lost in the outback with her young brother (Roeg's son, Luc), saved by an Aboriginal youth (David Gulpilil, in a star-making debut) undergoing his solitary rite of passage. Roeg shoots the desert with rapturous, almost abstract beauty — close-ups of insects and heat-shimmer, elliptical cutting, an Edward Bond script pared to a minimum of dialogue — so that the film communicates through image and juxtaposition rather than plot.

Its lyrical strangeness and its melancholy theme of irreconcilable worlds influenced a generation of film-makers drawn to elliptical, image-led storytelling, and Gulpilil became a pivotal figure in Australian cinema. Beneath the beauty runs a current of loss and missed understanding that lingers long after. Ravishing, mysterious and quietly sorrowful, Walkabout remains one of the most singular films of the early 1970s and a landmark of poetic cinema. Gulpilil became a defining presence in Australian cinema, and the film's elliptical lyricism continues to influence directors drawn to image-led storytelling. Roeg's rapturous, fragmentary imagery and its theme of irreconcilable worlds make it one of the most singular and influential films of the early 1970s.