WALKABOUT - A

Cinematographer-director Nicolas Roeg’s visually stunning tale finds two siblings lost in Australia’s outback, one teenage girl and one small school-aged boy, where they encounter an aborigine boy who is on a ritual journey (known as a ‘walkabout’).  Roeg’s imagery is practicably axiomatic so that the viewer is shown without intellectualism of any sort, the stark contrasts between urban and wild, civilization and nature, Australian and aborigine.  This is the film to study to understand the maximal contribution that cinematography can make to storytelling.  I would put in the same category both Lawrence of Arabia (1962, starring Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn, which won the Cinematography Oscar for Freddie Young) and Gravity (2013, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, which won the Cinematography Oscar for Emmanuel Lubezki).  The distance between the viewer and the scene is at once apparently so far yet we are intensely and inexorably in it. Since I wrote this several years ago, I have since seen several films by Cinematographer/Director Pawel Pawlikowski and recommend what I have seen to date:  Cold War, Ida and My Summer of Love.

I am at this point in time unable to recommend almost all of Mr. Roeg’s other directorial works because I have not seen most of them, except for The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976, starring David Bowie, Rip Torn and Candy Clark).  As cinematographer, Mr. Roeg’s credited and uncredited works are numerous and I refer you to the www.imdb.com website to see what might appeal to your tastes but I would strongly suggest that any of the BAFTA nominees are worthy of a viewing.

Starring Jenny Agutter, Lucien John (Roeg) and David Gulpilil, Walkabout was written by Edward Bond and inspired by the novel (1959) of the same name by John Vance Marshall.  Edward Bond wrote the English dialogue for the Michelangelo Antonioni film, Blow-Up (1966, starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles).  Walkabout was produced by Sy Litvinoff and was nominated for a Palme d’Or when it debuted in 1971.  It is very possible that I may have erred by not putting Walkabout in my top ten films of all time.  It is definitely vying most competitively with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971, starring Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee and Michael Bates.)  A Clockwork Orange was executive produced by Sy Litvinoff who optioned the Anthony Burgess novel.  He certainly had an ability to pick projects that shock and awe (A Clockwork Orange) and awe and shock (Walkabout).

Jenny Agutter has been in many films but I most recommend these three:  Logan’s Run (1976, starring Michael York Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Roscoe Lee Brown, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Ustinov), Equus (1977, starring Richard Burton with Peter Firth, Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins, Harry Andrews and Jenny Agutter) and An American Werewolf in London (1981, starring David Naughton, Jenny Agutter and Griffin Dunne).  David Gulpilil has been in several films but the two most recognizable roles for American audiences are probably from Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977, starring Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett and David Gulpilil) and Crocodile Dundee (1980, starring Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, John Meillon and David Gulpilil).  Luc Roeg has been a film producer since 1987.  I haven’t seen any of his films as a producer but I am immediately putting onto my must-see list his Othello (1995, starring Laurence Fishburne, Irene Jacob and Kenneth Branagh).

Running Time:  100 Minutes