Tag: Walkabout

Films are chapters of my life

Posted on by Paul Risker

Two young siblings, 16-year-old Girl (Jenny Agutter) and six-year-old boy (Luc Roeg), are stranded in the blistering heat of the Australian Outback. A picnic with their father turns violent when he tries to shoot them, before shooting himself. Seeing that he has set the car on fire, the Girl tells her brother that he will rejoin them later, as they try to find their way back to the city. Exhausted and starving, the pair cross paths with an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on ‘walkabout’, a ritual in which at the age of sixteen, a Aborigine man-child is sent out to survive off the land. Accompanying him on his ritual, he teaches the pair how to survive in the wilderness.

While Walkabout is Roeg’s only acting credit, he has produced Mr. Nice (Rose, 2010), We Need to Talk about Kevin (Ramsay, 2011), and Carol Morley’s The Falling and Out of Blue (2018), as well as music videos for bands including, Simple Minds and Tears for Fears.

In conversation with DMovies, Roeg discussed his memories of Walkabout, his relationship with his father, the late Nicolas Roeg, and films as chapters of one’s life.

Paul Risker – What are your memories of the experience and has your response to the film changed with time?

Luc Roeg – On a personal level I have very fond and warm memories of making the film – of being in that beautiful natural environment, and sharing that experience with my brothers and mother, and obviously my father who was directing and photographing the movie. In terms of how I look at the film now compared to when I was younger, even as a child and an adolescent, and through the various chapters of my life when I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting it, I still appreciate it in different ways.

As a child you see it and maybe all you see is yourself. Then as you get older and you’re making the chapters in your own life, you come to see more of the film and get more out of it. I think I’m distanced enough now to be able to look at it and see that young person in the film in an almost disconnected way, although I’ll never be disconnected – the film will always be a very personal and intimate experience.

PR – We often view the artist through their work, but as Nic’s son, did you learn anything about your father through his work?

LR – The reality is that I’ve never interrogated my father or my relationship with him through his work. I guess I’m as much of a fan as I am a son, because I have watched his films and appreciated, and enjoyed them as much as the next person who has enjoyed Nic’s work, without thinking that I’m in any way seeing the man through the work. I think that’s partly because he was so much about his work.

Everything in our lives and everything about Nic was always about his work, and I don’t say that in a negative way. It’s not uncommon with artists for their work and their life to be one. The moments of making films for him felt like chapters of his life. If I’m reading anything into his work, it’s the chapters of his life, and I’ve experienced that myself. It takes such a long period of time to make a film that they become chapters of your life. You can watch the film at a later stage in your life and remember that time, and it brings back certain feelings with it.

PR – Would you agree that Walkabout as a timeless quality because of the way in which Nic used image and sound, the camera and the edit to provoke an emotional response?

LR – Where all of his skill as a filmmaker comes to bear is in the way it makes you feel. It’s one of the hardest things to do as a filmmaker, not to make you laugh or feel happy or sad, but to make you interrogate your own feelings and to ask questions. Or to reveal feelings in yourself and to make you feel something. It’s a very difficult thing to do as a filmmaker, but personally in my opinion, it’s the holy grail. What makes your work timeless are those feelings.

Why Walkabout still feels contemporary is that it’s not caught in any decade because it’s set in a natural environment, and there are only three people in it. But all the attitudes and feelings of those three people could be as relevant today, and all of the ways it makes you feel are as relevant today as it was then.

You’re absolutely right, those are the qualities that makes a filmmaker stand out. He [Nic] had that ability through his work, and that came from his deep understanding of the technical process, and how to make a film. To be a great contemporary artist, you have to understand the absolute fundamentals of the art to deconstruct it.

PR – Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the filmmaking process, and should the audience also be transformed through their experience of a film?

LR – If you’ve created a piece of work in cinema that is a transformative piece of work, then you’ve achieved a big goal. It’s a very difficult thing to do and it comes back to your previous question about feeling. I think if you provoke feeling in an audience, or you make them interrogate their feelings in a way that they’re not used to or isn’t expected, then that’s a transformative moment in itself, and that’s a great thing to have achieved.

In terms of my own experiences of making films, yes, it’s linked to that element of them being chapters of your life. They take you to some extraordinary places, and just the challenge of making them, the creative partnerships you have with filmmakers, actors and technicians is in its own way as transformative as any learning and life experience is.

Walkabout is out now on Blu-ray

The image at the top is of Luc Roeg (sourced from The Criterion Channel); the image in the middle is a still from ‘Walkabout’.

Walkabout

Posted on by Paul Risker

Two young siblings, 16-year-old Girl (Jenny Agutter) and six-year-old boy (Luc Roeg), are stranded in the blistering heat of the Australian Outback. A picnic with their father turns violent when he tries to shoot them, before shooting himself. Seeing that he has set the car on fire, the Girl tells her brother that he will rejoin them later, as they try to find their way back to the city. Exhausted and starving, the pair cross paths with an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on ‘walkabout’, a ritual in which at the age of sixteen, a Aborigine man-child is sent out to survive off the land. Accompanying him on his ritual, he teaches the pair how to survive in the wilderness.

In considering Walkabout, Roeg’s first film Performance (1970), co-directed with Donald Cammell, and his third feature Don’t Look Now (1973), offer a series of interesting spatial contrasts. The openness of the Australian outback inevitably leaves an impression upon our memory. This casts a deep contrast to both a gangster hiding out in the London house of a former rock star in Performance, and the claustrophobic Venetian walkways and canals in Don’t Look Now. But Walkabout’s opening is a claustrophobic and a densely packed space.

The camera pans from a brick wall to look down a narrow street, cuts to a crowd of people, among them is the father, and then cuts between shots of their legs and upper bodies. We are then introduced to Girl in music class sat in a tight grid of occupied tables and chairs of girls practising breathing exercises. Boy is introduced pressed into a crowd of people on the side of the road as men in uniform march past. Meanwhile, the condensed apartment buildings in which the family live on top of other people introduces a layer of domestic claustrophobia.

The cinematography also conveys the dense city space. Roeg frames the father through or around visual obstructions, and angles the camera up toward an office window, like we’re craning our necks up, where he’s obviously in a tense work related meeting.

In spite of the vastness that is synonymous with the film, it’s not without claustrophobia – even the interior of the car, before Girl begins setting up the picnic and Boy runs around playing feels oppressive. This is a motif Roeg will return to at the close of the film, juxtaposing the wilderness with the city apartment that is not without a sense of irony.

A father’s attempted murder of his children versus a tragic accident at the opening of Don’t Look Now also forms a notable contrast. These are important because they forge an identity for a film amidst their place within a collective filmography. There is something simple about the tragedy of the latter, because the violent picnic touches upon a darker philosophical idea.

We are not born of free will – we are thrust into being, and we will experience the gamete of emotions, including suffering. To have children is an act of cruelty as much as it is a miraculous act, and the father’s act of cruelty as he tries to take his children out of this world can be read as an act of kindness.

Roeg and screenwriter Edward Bond, who adapted Donald G. Payne’s novel positions us as children, witnessing cruelty but not fully understanding it. But by the film’s conclusion, through an aged Girl, married and living in a city apartment, we experience a deeper insight into the cruelty that sparked the opening tragedy. Cruelty and kindness are not necessarily exclusive forces, and as immoral as the actions of the father are, they can be seen as trying to spare his children’s suffering. This engages a complex discussion. What is likely an uncomfortable and controversial theme of the drama for many, is whether we allow the hurt and experiences of life to suffocate us? Do we see death as something we have no control over, or do we assert control and embrace death as a choice? The film never fully commits to answering any of its own thematic enquiries, instead it invites us to read deeper into its soul and uncover our own feelings and ideas on the subject.

Walkabout is a powerful and an uncomfortable piece of filmmaking if engaged with honestly. We should not view it as pessimistic, but it is a look into the abyss of man, a parable that requires us to bring an openness and thoughtfulness to the experience. This is film as art, and Roeg does not attempt to create an experience in which we must exclusively suspend our disbelief. His authorial voice of cutting through time, the familiar raw treatment of the edit reveals his fingerprints. Walkabout is a record of a moment in the story of film that an auteur introduced himself, and the uncomfortable and darker thematic shades that form the film are complimented by his raw aesthetic.

Walkabout is out now on Blu-ray