Roeg was a cinematographer before he became a director, and Walkabout was the last film he photographed (not counting the concert documentary Glastonbury Fayre). There’s a noticeable difference in visual style between Performance and Walkabout and the films which followed, photographed by others: an occasionally self-conscious use of trick shots, most noticeably here a scene where the boy tells a story, punctuated by wipes that resemble turning pages. Later films were more classical visually, but Roeg’s signature editing style, creating associations by cross-cutting in time as well as space, is strongly in evidence here.

Working from a very spare script by Edward Bond, Roeg makes the landscape as much a character as the humans in it. He contrasts nature with the ravages of civilisation. To make his point, Roeg includes scenes of real hunters at work, in a scene that’s not for the squeamish. Walkabout contains a lot of sexual imagery, which seems quite natural with the three central characters, much coarser in a scene with a group of scientists. Ultimately, the girl, though attracted to the aborigine, cannot respond to him and retreats behind her middle-class respectability. Walkabout stays in the mind for a long time after seeing it; it remains perhaps Roeg’s most popular film.

When Walkabout was re-released in 1998 (after having been long unavailable due to rights issues), publicity referred to five minutes being restored to the film. This was to the version released in the USA only: barring minor BBFC cuts to the cinema release, the full-length version has always been the one shown in British cinemas and on TV. Criterion’s DVD is in a ratio of 1.77:1, and the transfer – though non-anamorphic – is sharp and clear, doing full justice to Roeg’s cinematography. The sound is mono, as was the cinema release. The disc is light on extras compared to other Criterion releases. There are two trailers, both ending with “perhaps the most different film you’ll ever see” (imagine trying to sell a film that way nowadays). Roeg and Agutter’s commentary, recorded separately and edited together, works very well and is often very interesting. Roeg can sometimes ramble and go off on tangents, but he makes good points about how the language of cinema has been largely unexplored and how“entertainment” has been debased so that it becomes no more than distraction. Walkabout is a vindication of this.

Gary Couzens