Peter Weir (1975)
[Two impressions of the film – nearly fifty years apart. As usual, a ‘Take 1/Take 2’ arrangement to juxtapose the notes but they’re more than usually different from each other: the 1970s note was obviously incomplete!]
Take 1
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 pupils and a teacher on a girls’ school outing on 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 the compositions bring the paintings of Sidney Nolan to mind.) The girls, in 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 girls 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 are picnicking, 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 sends 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, ‘Waiting a million years, just for us’. 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.’
Take 2
Wikipedia’s entry on Australian New Wave Cinema explains that, by the early 1960s, the Australian film industry was nearly extinct and dates its renaissance, in the shape of the Australian New Wave, from the early 1970s. Some of the earliest entries in the list of films that follows, however, are at best qualified examples of New Wave cinema. While Australian landscape and culture are certainly essential to Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (both 1971), neither film was made by an Australian. Bruce Beresford is Australian and an important New Wave director but his debut feature, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), is set in England and an example of ‘Ozploitation’ comedy. The first films made by Peter Weir – who would go on to be internationally the most successful Australian filmmaker of his generation (even more successful than Beresford and Fred Schepisi) – are a different matter. The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) is a horror comedy, set in a small rural town in New South Wales. Weir’s next film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, has reasonably been described as ‘Australia’s First International Hit’. It’s now celebrating its fiftieth birthday with a 4K restoration and re-release.
This BFI screening of Picnic at Hanging Rock must have been at least my third viewing all told – but the first time I’d watched the film aware that it’s not based on actual events. Whether or not that should have made a difference to how I saw things, it did. The film barely speculates as to the fate of the two teenage pupils and the mathematics mistress who go missing, never to return, on a day trip from a school called Appleyard College on Valentine’s Day 1900. Peter Weir and the scriptwriter, Cliff Green, make no bones about this: introductory text on the screen explains that ‘To this day their disappearance remains a mystery’ – yet those very words seem to imply a real-life basis to the story we’re to be told. If the unsolved mystery were a matter of fact, we’d accept not getting an answer to what happened to the trio. It’s hard to allow fiction the same leeway. We rather expect its creators to make sense of the world they construct, never mind that the world we live in tends not to make sense. When a writer or filmmaker decides not to do this, it feels like a dereliction of duty.
The definite tone of that opening legend isn’t an invention on Weir and Green’s part, though. As mentioned in the footnote to ‘Take 1’, Joan Lindsay’s novel, on which the film is based, ‘begins and ends with a pseudo-historical prologue and epilogue ….’ According to Jan Dawson’s Sight and Sound (Spring 1976) interview with Peter Weir, which forms part of the BFI handout for Picnic at Hanging Rock, the source novel deceives the reader in ways the film doesn’t: Lindsay, Dawson wrote, channels ‘the omniscient condescension of an Agatha Christie’. Weir can’t be accused of that. As he made clear to Jan Dawson, he was ‘more interested in atmosphere than character’ – and atmosphere is his priority throughout. My chief disappointment with Picnic at Hanging Rock revisited came from finding its creation of atmosphere, especially in the lead-up to the vanishing, more long-winded and emphatic than I’d remembered.
Golden-haired Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), who will be one of the disappeared, is well-named and central to the design. The film’s opening words – ‘What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream’ – are spoken by her (says IMDb, though the speaker is off-camera); they can hardly fail to evoke words in a play featuring another Miranda (not just ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ but also, given what’s going to happen in Picnic at Hanging Rock, ‘spirits … melted into air, into thin air’). There’s a trance-like quality to the early narrative, thanks to Russell Boyd’s ingenious lighting and Max Lemon’s editing, but the flow of images is sometimes interrupted by overly significant lines. Miranda tells Sara (Margaret Nelson), her roommate and admirer, ‘You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara, I won’t be here much longer’. The French mistress, Mlle de Poitiers (Helen Morse), leafing through an art history book, likens Miranda to a ‘Botticelli angel’. This is true only up to a point: Anne-Louise Lambert is paradisally lovely but also very aware of the camera.
The dominance of atmosphere in what follows the pivotal disappearance is unsatisfying in a different way. The young Englishman Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard), also picnicking in the area on Valentine’s Day, with his aunt and uncle, becomes obsessed with finding the missing members of the school party. Albert Crundall (John Jarratt), the Fitzhubert family’s young factotum, joins Michael on his quest; when Albert warns it will soon be dark, Michael insists on staying on the rock – ‘because somebody has to’. He’s not wrong: the police investigation is perfunctory, to say the least. It seems meant to be, yet you can’t help feeling that also reflects Peter Weir’s own uninterest in this side of the story. At the same time, Weir doesn’t dispense with elements of Joan Lindsay’s plot. I’d forgotten that, although four people disappear, one of the three girls, Irma (Karen Robson), is found, by Albert, days later. Irma is physically unscathed but, of course, unable to remember what caused her to lose consciousness and her companions, Miranda and Marion (Jane Vallis), to vanish.
In some cases, the voices of the younger performers were ‘dubbed in secret by professional voice actors, as Weir had cast the young actresses for their innocent appearance rather than their acting ability’ (Wikipedia). Yet the deliberate playing and delivery extends to more experienced actors, too – Dominic Guard and Helen Morse are among the few exceptions. As the headmistress, Rachel Roberts is certainly authoritative. Roberts’ vocal power is one part of that; another is Mrs Appleyard’s extraordinary coiffure – easily mistaken, at first sight, for helmet-like headgear. When the camera shows a coil of the headmistress’s hair out of place, it’s a sure sign she’s coming apart – because the Hanging Rock scandal has led parents to withdrawing their daughters from her school. Drink dependency and suicide soon follow. (Mrs Appleyard’s breakdown makes for particularly unhappy viewing if you know Rachel Roberts’ own fate.) Other familiar faces in the cast include Vivean Gray (Mrs Mangel in Neighbours, a decade or so later), as the maths mistress Miss McCraw, and Jacki Weaver, as Minnie, a maid at the College.
The too emphatic voices, although uncomfortable to listen to, do contribute to Picnic at Hanging Rock‘s oddness of mood – simply because they’re incongruous with the beguiling visuals. They are, in other words – even if this isn’t what the actors or the director intended – part of the atmosphere that Weir so prized. The mismatch between visual sophistication and often rudimentary acting also has the effect of sharpening one’s awareness of the film as historically significant. Picnic at Hanging Rock, at this distance in time, represents Australian cinema on the cusp of change rather than on the crest of the New Wave. Fred Schepisi’s early features, The Devil’s Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), are more powerful and persuasive New Wave dramas.
The Australian New Wave directors sometimes gave the impression of being anxious to confound stereotyped ideas about the Aussie male – to make their work look as beautifully artful as possible, at the expense of other elements. A prime example of this tendency, Picnic at Hanging Rock conveys a palpable sense of Peter Weir’s aesthetic ambition. You can feel, and enjoy, his excitement in working, with Russell Boyd and art director David Copping, to construct fancy imagery. Birdlife, for example, both echoes and seems to comment on the schoolgirls. The white turkeys in the grounds of Appleyard College run freer than the white-clad girls are allowed to do on the outing to Hanging Rock. (Mrs Appleyard gives strict instructions – no climbing on the dangerous outcrop, watch out for the poisonous snakes – as the girls, and the two staff supervising them, prepare to depart. It’s the more permissive Mlle de Poitiers who, after lunch, agrees to Miranda’s request that she and the other girls venture further.) A swan, seen swimming later in the film, becomes Miranda’s virtual avatar; there’s also an ornamental swan in the room that she shared with Sara.
What has aged best in the film is Weir’s treatment of the sexual undertow of Appleyard College. This single-sex private school – an ‘Educational Establishment for Young Ladies’ – is situated in the state of Victoria and, in time, at the very end of the reign of the queen for whom the state is named. The only men about the place are menials. The only evidence of sexual activity involves servants, as Minnie hurriedly dresses after a session in bed with handyman Tom (Anthony Llewellyn Jones). Mrs Appleyard is a widow; the other teaching staff, including prematurely frumpy Miss Lumley (Kirsty Child), are unmarried. On the morning of Valentine’s Day, the girls smile over messages they’ve sent to each other; one of them giggles that ‘Somebody had the nerve to send Miss McCraw a card on squared paper covered with tiny sums’.
The maths mistress will be an important figure in the story. En route to the picnic site, she trots out facts about the relative ages of Hanging Rock and of surrounding rock formations; after the picnic, she notices that her pocket-watch has stopped (‘Never stopped before – must be something magnetic’). Yet just before Miranda and the others disappear into the rock crevice, Miss McCraw is, unaccountably, standing close by. A fourth schoolgirl, Edith (Christine Schuler), accompanies Miranda, Irma and Marion on their fateful journey but only so far. An habitual moaner, clumsy, bespectacled Edith emerges from the rocks screaming. She raises the alarm with Mlle de Poitiers and gives the only, limited testimony as to what happened on Hanging Rock. As she was coming back down the hill, Edith met the maths mistress, on her way up; Miss McCraw wasn’t wearing a skirt – ‘just les pantalons’. Near the end of the film, Mrs Appleyard, in her cups, laments the loss of Miss McCraw and angrily speculates on her fate:
‘I came to depend so much on Greta McCraw. So much masculine intellect. I came to rely on that woman. Trust her. How could she allow herself to be spirited away? Lost. Raped. Murdered in cold blood like a silly schoolgirl!’
The theme of suppressed or thwarted female sexuality is liable to retrospective abuse. The BFI handout also included an excerpt from the study of Picnic at Hanging Rock in the BFI Film Classics series, published in 2022. Its author, Anna Backman Rogers, reckons that this ‘haunting’ film:
‘… intimates a far more sinister reality: a violence done to young girls on the cusp of womanhood, the denial and disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people and their land, and the folly and arrogance of white, colonial, European settler culture held in place by pomp, ceremony and arcane ritual …’
This is pushing it, to say the least. A single reference in the script to ‘a bloody Abo tracker’ is as much coverage as ‘the Aboriginal people and their land’ get. In the British Empire department, Michael Fitzhubert’s uncle is a retired English colonel and Mrs Appleyard’s framed photographs include one of Queen Victoria. Backman Rogers would doubtless claim that these themes are powerfully implicit in the film and/or that their very absence from it is meaningful. It’s easier to believe that she’s ticking the boxes of misogyny, abuse of Indigenous Peoples and colonialism (and so helping to give ‘wokeness’ a bad name).
Peter Weir’s handling of the story’s female sexuality aspect is where his preference for ‘atmosphere’ pays off, and impressive because it’s suggestive. This is apt for a sexual awareness that’s largely or partly unconscious: inchoate, in relation to the schoolgirls; repressed or frustrated, in the case of the teaching staff. The narrative also conveys social snobbery and prejudice within the white community. From the start, Mrs Appleyard disparages the ill-fated Sara, an orphan whose school fees are paid by her guardian. Albert Crundall, too, as he tells Michael Fitzhubert, started life in an orphanage – along with his kid sister. It may seem pat when he reveals that the sister’s name was Sara; even so, the fact that the orphan siblings’ paths never again cross makes a social point effectively. One other thing I’d forgotten about the film: the Romanian pan pipes are by no means the whole of the music – in fact, there’s a great deal more of Bruce Smeaton’s relatively conventional score. Weir’s rationing of Gheorghe Zamfir’s contribution recognises how precious an atmospheric resource it is.
25 February 2025
