Walkabout · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the image that won't leave: a teenage girl in a grey pleated school uniform and knee socks, picking her way across red rock that goes on forever. The uniform is absurd out here. That absurdity is the whole film. Roeg, a cinematographer making his first solo feature, doesn't argue the gap between civilization and wilderness — he cuts it into you, frame against frame, until the cuts start thinking on their own.

Watch what he does with the kangaroo. The Aboriginal boy brings one down, and Roeg slams that butchering against a white butcher carving meat behind glass in a shop. Two shots that share no space, no time, no story-thread — and a third thing leaps out of the gap: a judgment, a rhyme, an idea about killing and consuming that neither shot contains alone. This is what Eisenstein called dialectical montage — colliding images producing a meaning that lives in the collision, not in either picture. Soviet cinema used it to forge revolutionary thought from steel and crowds. Roeg privatizes it. He turns the conceptual cut into a way of feeling, and the technique is the direct inheritance of his own cutting room: the fractured flash-cutting he'd built shooting Petulia and co-directing Performance, where bodies and spaces rhyme across impossible distances. Walkabout is where that grammar becomes a worldview.

Deleuze would say the film has tipped out of the movement-image — the regime where a character sees a situation and acts to change it — into something stranger. Consider the engine that starts everything: the father drives his children to a picnic and tries to shoot them. There is no motive, no situation that action could resolve. This is the crisis of the action-image at its purest — a world where the sensory-motor link snaps, where what you perceive can no longer be answered by what you do. The children are stranded not just in the desert but in a story that has stopped behaving like a story. They can only walk, look, endure.

And the desert obliges by refusing to be a mere setting. Roeg shoots it with telephoto lenses that flatten the figures to specks against escarpments and salt pans, then drops to macro for scorpions and ants seething in the dirt — sublime and crawling at once, indifferent and overflowing. Deleuze has a name for terrain like this: the any-space-whatever, a space drained of its function as a stage for action, left as pure affect, pure void-and-abundance. (The framing debt is visible — Roeg ran second unit on Lawrence of Arabia, learned there how a horizon dwarfs a person — but Lean's desert is a field for heroism, and Roeg's is a field for being lost in.) What blooms in such spaces is the pure optical situation: the children, and we, are reduced to seeing. The girl swims; the boy hunts; the camera watches with a frankness that has unsettled viewers for fifty years. Nothing here advances a plot. It is dead time, the everyday held open until it starts to glow.

The whole interlude, too, is wrapped in memory. Roeg fractures the chronology with flash-forwards, and the coda reveals the girl years on, a married woman in a city kitchen, the desert returning to her as a lost Eden. So the film we've watched is a recollection-image — a former present, dated and mourned, reaching back not to act but to grieve. That retrospective frame is the move L'Avventura licensed: alienated bodies against barren ground, narrative closure withheld, the art-cinema permission Antonioni handed the decade. Roeg takes it to the outback.

The heartbreak is built on a single failure to read. In the final act the Aboriginal boy performs an elaborate courtship dance — a gest, a posture that lays bare an entire social relation, the offering of a self. The girl cannot decode it. She has no language for it, retreats into her uniform and her conditioning, and the consequence is fatal. Here the image becomes a lectosign: it stops being self-evident and demands to be deciphered, and the tragedy is precisely that deciphering fails. The film's whole sound world reinforces the rift. John Barry's swelling, romantic score sweetens images the story will turn bitter; Housman's verse arrives as elegy over the end ("Into my heart an air that kills"); the children and the boy share no tongue. Voice and image keep telling different stories — an audiovisual disjunction that makes the broken communication you can't see into something you can hear. The structural ancestor is The Naked Prey, which first made the untranslated wilderness and the indigenous Other into a survival grammar; Roeg keeps the language barrier but kills the suspense, turning escape into elegy.

What did this do to film? It proved you could carry a feature on association alone — that the cut could make arguments, that landscape could think, that a survival adventure could dissolve into a poem about everything modern life can't accommodate. Roeg would sharpen the method into the terror of Don't Look Now, and the elliptical, rhyming cut would seed itself everywhere from Malick's drifts to the modern memory-film. He handed cinema a way to mourn a paradise by refusing to let us hold it. Watch it again and notice: you remember it exactly the way the girl does — in fragments, out of order, too late.