 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| Walkabout | |||
"There’s something to be said for a movie that helps us see ourselves in a new and darker light. And that is the greatest praise one can offer Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, one of cinema’s most haunting and disorienting visions, a deceptively beautiful masterpiece that has been missing from the cinematic landscape of theater, video, and DVD for far too long." – S James Snyder, New York Sun "The idea that the otherworldly, ancient landscape of the Australian interior has been somehow impenetrable to its country’s more recent settlers, the vast majority of whom live in the towns that cling to the safety of the coast, has been one that has long occupied the Australian imagination, explored in books and films by Australians and outsiders alike…. The Outback is so unfathomably old and vast, so empty and so perilous, that it’s a perfect setting for allegorical tales that seem to exist outside of reality and history. Nicolas Roeg, in Walkabout (1971), his debut as sole director after years as a celebrated cinematographer and then co-director of Performance (1970), explored that sense more vividly than any film-maker before or since. Perhaps it demanded the clarity of the expatriate gaze, for in Walkabout the Englishman Roeg captures the feeling of the Outback as a place divorced from time — an infinite wilderness in which to set the fable-like story of a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her younger brother (the director’s son Luc Roeg) who become lost before being rescued by a teenage Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his own rite-of-passage walkabout. The film is based on a 1959 children’s novel by James Vance Marshall, and was adapted by Edward Bond, who famously provided only a 14-page script. Bond had told Roeg that he wanted to write about a journey, which impressed the director, because it was not about a plot, but looser and more like life: a journey through incidents, landscape, people. Indeed, a summary of the plot only hints at the many layers of the film. Roeg takes the story and from it fashions a piece of pure cinema through the use of mesmerising images of the landscape, dramatic shifts to the subjective points of view of its characters, and the jarring juxtapositions in editing for which he would become well known. On the one hand it is a simple adventure story; but it is also a coming-of-age tale and a comment on the disconnect in western society, with the Outback as the Edenic, innocent land before the fall. Throughout, the film summons in the viewer a sense of nostalgic reverie — of looking back and remembering the wonder taken in small things during childhood, from rolling down a sand dune to imagining explorers crossing the desert by camel. The famous scene in which the 17-year-old Agutter swims naked in a rock pool is at once a display of nascent sexuality directed at the character played by David Gulpilil, and a last gasp of childhood innocence before the onset of coy modesty imposed by the strictures of “proper” adult behaviour." – James Bell, Sight & Sound |
|
||
| Australia 1971 | |||
Director/Photography: Nicolas Roeg With: Jenny Agutter (girl), Lucien John (white boy), David Gulpilil (black boy), John Meilon, Robert McDara (men), Pete Carver (no hoper), John Illingsworth (young man), Hilary Bamberger (woman) 100 mins, 35mm (1,85:1) PG cert Dunedin Film Society |
|||
