Picnic at Hanging Rock

(Australia, 1975, 110 minutes)

Direction: Peter Weir
Script: Cliff Green, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay
Cinematography: Russell Boyd
Music: J.S. Bach, Ludwig von Beethoven, Bruce Smeaton
Cast: Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver, Vivean Gray, Kirsty Child, Anne Lambert, Karen Robson, Jane Vallis, Christine Schuler, Margaret Nelson, John Jarratt, Ingrid Mason, Martin Vaughan, Jack Fegan, Wyn Roberts, Garry McDonald, Frank Gunnell.

On St. Valentine's Day, 1900, a party of schoolgirls and their teachers celebrate by going on a picnic excursion to a gigantic volcanic rock, described as a "geological wonder" by their geometry teacher, Miss McCraw. Three students and Miss McCraw disappear without trace. The subsequent recovery of one girl, her apparent amnesia, the questioning of various witnesses, and the marks on the foreheads of several who survive the experience of being lost on the rock lend an eerie edge to the tale.

A recurring theme in Peter Weir's oeuvre, the presence of the unknown is perhaps most palpable in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Unlike many filmmakers, Weir does not give the audience the distanced perspective of omniscience; much like the characters, we are swept into the mystery of what happened on the rock. The film's lush imagery and just-beneath-the-surface eroticism add to its hypnotic effect. From the opening scenes of the film, the atmosphere is charged with semi-repressed sexual longing: students for students, students for teachers, the gardener for the maid. The only characters who act on their sexual feelings, the gardener and the maid, do so in secret. The only character who openly expresses her feelings, Sara, is somewhat of an outcast.

Many of the most striking images from the film's first half involve the idea of a particular view; much like in The Double Life of Veronique, we are made aware of the view's construction through shots that show us the construction of an image (reflections, the magnifying glass, the photo of Miranda). The most striking example of this is the French teacher's comparison of Miranda to "a Botticelli angel." When we see the Botticelli "angel," it turns out to be Botticelli's famous painting of Venus, who is definitely not an angel, particularly by Victorian standards.

For the most part, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in two contrasting locales: the school, a building of classical symmetry, the ultimate controlled environment, and the rock, which seems alive in its own right. Repeated shots of face-like outcroppings of the rock, closeups of moving insects and reptiles (especially snakes, associated with original sin), particularly while the schoolgirls are asleep on the rock, and the wheeling flocks of birds give this natural environment a wild, alien quality.

Interestingly, the film ends with the deaths of two characters who did not go on the picnic: Sara throws herself from the school rooftop and is discovered in the school greenhouse (!), while Mrs. Appleyard is apparently rejected by the rock, since her body is discovered, in contrast to the other characters. Although Weir does not give much time to on-screen speculation about what happened to the individuals who disappeared on the rock, the one possibility that is mentioned--abduction--plants the seed of the idea that the rock itself abducted them.

Fearless (1993); Green Card (1990); Dead Poets Society (1989); The Mosquito Coast (1986); Witness (1985); The Year of Living Dangerously (1983); Gallipoli (1981); The Plumber (1979); The Last Wave (1977); Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); The Cars That Ate Paris (1974).

--film notes by Heather Inman