Picnic at Hanging Rock
Peter Weir (1975)
In the first shot of Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), a gnarled old Aborigine man is painting primitive-looking designs on the underside of a mass of jutting stone in the shadow of which he sits cross-legged. ‘Hanging rock’, announced a smart-aleck voice in the cinema, referring to the director’s previous film. Picnic at Hanging Rock is a beautifully composed but dramatically thin account of an Australian cause célèbre – the disappearance, without trace, of three pupils and one of their teachers on a girls’ school outing on St Valentine’s Day in the year 1900[1]. The real-life-unsolved-mystery of the story removes the need for Weir to explain the supernatural atmosphere he creates in which to shroud the vanishing – a combination of sound, editing rhythm and visual compositions that alternate between sunlit paradise and forbidding terra incognita. (Some of these compositions bring to mind the paintings of Sidney Nolan.) The girls, with their trance-like movement and diaphanous dresses, are so ethereal that disappearing into thin air seems a natural tendency of their physical condition. The first part of Picnic at Hanging Rock is intriguing; after the trio and their teacher have dematerialised, the film runs down. The ‘mystery’ begins to lose its grip – partly as one grows accustomed to Weir’s technique, partly too because the director seems to lose interest in the matter of what happened. He pursues conventionally the investigations, public and private, into the disappearance and explores superficially the psychological effect of the affair on the major characters of the story. The most interesting element of Picnic is its depiction of the schoolgirls (if not their teacher) as turn of the century ephemera, as representing a long-gone as well as a short-lived species of human life.
While the girls picnic, Russell Boyd’s camera contemplates them in God’s-eye view long shot and describes the microscopic world around and beneath them. Both perspectives suggest that the girls are a thin, decorative layer topping a much more substantial creation – implied in the pulsing variety of sounds and brought startlingly under one’s nose in a close-up of the ground, teeming with insect life. The Gheorghe Zamfir panpipe music that Weir uses to score the picture send the mind way back, from the specific time and place that the sets and costumes precisely convey to ‘earlier and other creation’. Hanging Rock itself, implacably and unthinkably old, reinforces the sense of more-things-in-heaven-and-earth than were dreamt of in the philosophy of a single-sex Australian boarding school in the twilight of the Victorian era. The most memorable line in Cliff Grant’s script is triggered by the dry-as-dust maths mistress. She reels off facts and figures about the enormous age of the rock and one of the girls replies: ‘Just think: it’s been waiting for millions of years for us to come’. This may or may not be meant as a spuriously arrogant human reaction to evolution’s daunting timescale. Either way, it expresses succinctly the collision of long-standing and transient forms of existence. In The Last Wave, Peter Weir remains preoccupied with atmosphere, the hugeness of nature and the unconscious, the relative limits of the conscious mind. Dreams figure prominently and restore you to a childish attitude towards the light of day – which takes away not only the dark but also the possibility of nightmares.
[1970s]
[1] Afternote: These references to the factual basis of the film are wrong. Picnic at Hanging Rock was adapted from a 1967 book by Joan Lindsay – a work of fiction, although Wikipedia notes as follows:
‘The novel … begins and ends with a pseudo-historical prologue and epilogue …. However, while the geological feature, Hanging Rock, and the several towns mentioned are actual places near Mount Macedon, the story is not completely [sic] true. Lindsay had [sic] done little to dispel the myth that the story is based on truth, in many interviews either refusing to confirm it was entirely fiction, or hinting that parts of the book were fictitious, and others were not. Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1900 was a Wednesday, not a Saturday as depicted in the story. All attempts by enthusiastic readers to find historical evidence of the event, characters, or even Appleyard College, have proved fruitless.’