Day 10: Walkabout (1971)

Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout” is a leisurely paced tale depicting both the similarities and differences between our modernized civilization and the untamed world beyond our city limits. In the film, the culture clash takes place in Australia, a country with areas still uninhabited to this day, and, through a very simple story, we are given the full scope of the “land down under” as well as plea to appreciate, as Jack London once stated, the call of the wild.

“Walkabout” follows the journey of a teenage girl and her younger brother, who find themselves lost in the Australian outback after their father drives them out for a picnic but then subsequently sets their car on fire and kills himself. Now lost, the two wander the desert, unsure if they will ever make contact with society again. Fortunately, their lives are saved by an Aborigine in the midst of his walkabout- a six month period of isolated survival where a tribe boy becomes a man, and soon the three set off on a trek to find civilization while forming a bound that will overcome the communication barrier, which lives between them.

Before directing, Roeg was a cinematographer on such films as “Fahrenheit 451″ and “A Funny Thing Happend on the Way to the Forum” and here he pushes his skills to the limits, giving us a gorgeous, almost still life, look at the Australian wilderness. But the shots are not simply put in for visual effect. In every instance, Roeg is conveying a very specific sense of imagery to either evoke a certain mood or to signify a comparison/contrast between the shots being intercut.

From the very beginning of the film, we are shown a carefully arranged collage of shots in the busy city of Adelaide, but, as people go about and cars move down the crammed roads, a didgeridoo warbles over the film. It is this contrasting mix of old tribal music with the steel and concrete modernization of city life that help us realize we still live in a jungle, just simply one we’ve constructed.

Later, as the two children suffer in the heat of the desert, Roeg uses the same idea of intercut shots to give us a sense of danger approaching the children. Shots of a cow skeleton and a lizard eating one of its own flash onto the screen as children grow weaker on their journey, giving the audience an understanding of what happens when the clutches of the wild grab onto the unprepared.

One of Roeg’s best intercuts is when the Aborigine hunts. As he brings down a kangaroo and strikes it in the head with a club, a “civilized” scene of a butcher cutting kangaroo meat into thick slices is intercut. Once again, as the Aborigine kills and disembowels a rabbit, we watch the butcher imitate the action. It is this interconnected relationship between shots that helps signify a very specific point- we are all the same.

“Walkabout” is a beautiful movie where the the collision of Australia’s ancient outback and burgeoning cityscape give us a reason to pause and contemplate the what actually separates different cultures and what could possibly be done to bring them together.

To learn more about “Walkabout,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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