Roeg, already a divine director of photography for Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451) and Lester (Petulia), emerges here from a co-direction (the equally seminal Performance) to sign his manifesto. And he does so by taking the concept of “narrative” and drowning it in the Australian desert. Walkabout is a film that you feel on your skin: the heat, the dust, the absolute, terrifying indifference of reality.

The film opens with a vision of the apocalypse that is both sterile and deafening. The inflexible geometry of Adelaide, the Stockhausen-esque synthetic sounds (or is it just the white noise of our despair?) coming out of a portable radio, and an act of thanatos so sudden and unexplained that it shakes the foundations of the narrative pact. The Father (John Meillon), an archetypal figure of bourgeois alienation, attempts to kill his children and then kills himself, setting fire to the car that is the last simulacrum of that civilization. There is no psychological motive, no context; there is only implosion. Roeg tells us immediately that the rules of our logic are suspended. The Girl (Jenny Agutter, in a role that defines her career) and the Boy (Luc Roeg, the director's son) wander off into the desert, still dressed in their impeccable school uniforms. They are Adam and Eve, expelled not from the Garden, but from the air-conditioned prison.

Roeg's Outback is not David Lean's lyrical desert. It is a teeming cosmos, a living, almost sentient entity, which the director (who is also his own sublime cinematographer) films with the precision of an entomologist and the ecstasy of a mystic. He uses long focal length lenses to compress space, to make the air vibrate with heat, transforming the horizon into a liquid mirage. The eye of his camera does not merely observe; it penetrates. Macro shots of insects, crawling reptiles, the very grain of the sand. Roeg does not show us a landscape; he shows us an ecosystem where every element, from the smallest grain to the vastness of the sky, is connected in a cycle of creation and destruction that has nothing to do with human morality. The desert is not “empty.” It is full to the brim with a life that is foreign to us, and the soundtrack (Karlheinz Stockhausen, but also amplified natural sounds) underscores this radical otherness.

It is in this ecological Purgatory that the encounter takes place. The appearance of the Aboriginal Boy (David Gulpilil's magnetic and seminal debut) is not a deus ex machina, but the introduction of a completely different system of knowledge. Gulpilil, with his presence that transcends acting and enters the realm of being, is not Rousseau's “Noble Savage.” Roeg is too intelligent to fall into this trap. The boy is, quite simply, competent. He can read the signs that are background noise to the two white men. He can find water where there is only dust. He can hunt.

And this is where Roeg's editing (assisted by Graeme Clifford) becomes the main tool of philosophical inquiry. Walkabout is perhaps the greatest example of cinema as structuralism. Roeg uses editing not to advance the plot (which is minimal: survival), but to create semantic collisions. The most famous scene, and rightly so, is that of the butcher. While the Aboriginal Boy hunts a kangaroo with ritual precision, a dance of necessity, Roeg slaps us in the face, with brutal cuts, with a butcher in a civilized shop cutting up carcasses. Is the violence the same? No. The editing forces us to see the difference: the first is participation in the cycle of life; the second is sterile, disconnected violence, an act of pure consumption.

This technique is omnipresent. The girl trying to communicate with the boy using gestures, and Roeg cutting to white researchers at a weather station launching weather balloons: two equally failed attempts to measure and control the immeasurable. The film is an essay on the tragic untranslatability of experiences. Language is not just an obstacle; the entire mindset is. When the little brother tries to translate, he simplifies the girl's culture into “She says no,” and the boy's culture into “He says the water is further on.” It is the collapse of semiotics.

The famous sequence of the Girl bathing naked is a masterpiece of balance. Far from any voyeuristic titillation, it is the scene of possibility. It is a return to a pre-lapsarian state, a literal immersion in the landscape. Roeg films it with absolute candor, but charged with a tension that is not (only) sexual, but cultural. It is the moment when “civilization”—shame, modesty, ownership of the body—could be washed away. But this scene is edited in parallel with the boy's hunting and dancing. Their worlds brush against each other, visually overlapping, but never truly meeting. The film is based on the novel by James Vance Marshall, but Roeg and screenwriter Edward Bond wisely betray its spirit, rejecting the paternalistic conversion of the original book for a much darker and infinitely more honest ending.

The tragedy of Walkabout is not hunger or thirst. The tragedy is the failure of connection. The crucial moment is the Aboriginal Boy's ritual dance. It is an offering, an attempt to bridge the gap through art, ritual, perhaps even courtship. But the Girl, frightened, a prisoner of the codes she has brought with her into the desert, interprets it as a threat. She rejects it. And that rejection is a death blow. Her “civilized” reaction (fear of the unknown, repression of sexuality) leads directly to the Boy's despair and death (stylized, poetic, terrible). It was not the desert that killed him; it was civilization. It is a microcosm of cultural genocide: the inability to see the Other as anything other than an imperfect version of oneself or as a threat.

And then, the ending. A stroke of genius that breaks your heart. A flash-forward shows us the Girl, years later, back in the same Adelaide she fled from. Now she is a middle-class woman, trapped in a sterile apartment, with a husband (a dull businessman on the phone) who embodies everything the desert was not. And while he talks about promotions, she remembers. Roeg gives us back the image of the lake, of paradise lost, of the three (her, her brother, the boy) swimming freely. It is not nostalgia. It is a funeral lament for a missed opportunity. She chose civilization, but now she understands that that was the real death. The beginning of the journey was not a test of physical survival, but a spiritual test, and she—representative of our entire “rational” world—failed.

Walkabout is a film that continues to raise questions. It is a work of piercing beauty and profound sadness, a visual poem that uses editing like a scalpel to cut through the skin of reality and expose the raw nerves of our disconnection. It is the birth certificate of a visionary auteur and a lament for a world we have forgotten how to inhabit.