Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

During a rural summer picnic, a few students and a teacher from an Australian girls' school vanish without a trace. Their absence frustrates and haunts the people left behind.

Director:

Peter Weir

Writers:

Joan Lindsay (novel), Cliff Green (screenplay)

Stars:

Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Vivean Gray

Won 1 BAFTA Film Award. Another 3 wins & 12 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Rachel Roberts	...	Mrs. Appleyard
Vivean Gray	...	Miss Greta McCraw
Helen Morse	...	Mlle. de Poitiers
Kirsty Child	...	Miss Lumley
Tony Llewellyn-Jones	...	Tom (as Anthony Llewellyn-Jones)
Jacki Weaver	...	Minnie
Frank Gunnell	...	Mr. Whitehead
Anne-Louise Lambert	...	Miranda St Clare (as Anne Lambert)
Karen Robson	...	Irma
Jane Vallis	...	Marion Quade
Christine Schuler	...	Edith
Margaret Nelson	...	Sara Waybourne
Ingrid Mason	...	Rosamund
Jenny Lovell	...	Blanche
Janet Murray	...	Juliana

Storyline

Three students and a school teacher disappear on an excursion to Hanging Rock, in Victoria, on Valentine's Day, 1900. The movie follows those that disappeared, and those that stayed behind, but it delights in the asking of questions, not the answering of them. Even though both the movie and the book it was based on claim to be inspired by real events, the story is completely fictional.

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Plot Keywords:

year 1900 | vanishing | unexplained | supernatural overtones | horror overtones | 

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Taglines:

On St. Valentine's Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock. ...Some were never to return.

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Genres:

Drama | Mystery

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Certificate:

PG

Did You Know?

Trivia

Principal photography took up six weeks.

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Goofs

The movie takes place in February 1900, 11 months before the Australian colonies federated and 11 years before the creation of the Australian Capital Territory within New South Wales. When Mrs Appleyard addresses the gathered pupils to communicate the merciful deliverance of their classmate Irma, the NSW map behind nearby Miss Lumley clearly shows the existence of the ACT (defined in red).

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Quotes

[first lines]
Miranda: What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.

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Alternate Versions

The director's cut deletes several scenes from the original release version:

• Irma thanking Albert for finding her and Michael's growing relationship with Irma, climaxing in his demanding to know what happened at the Rock.
• a brief sequence inside the church during the memorial service of the girls crying.
• Mrs Appleyard removing some of Sarah's belongings at night after her disappearance. There are two very minor additions:
• A brief sequence of a photographer getting a picture of the school before being shooed off.
• A smoother introduction to the scene where Albert tells Michael of his dream of Sarah, beginning with Michael telling him how he often dreams of the Rock.

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Connections

Referenced in At the Movies: Pleasantville/The Alarmist/The Lion King II: Simba's Pride/Apt Pupil/Life is Beautiful (1998)

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Soundtracks

Piano Concerto No 5 in E Flat Major (Emperor Concerto), 2nd Movement
Written by Ludwig van Beethoven

User Reviews

If you're up for a free-form dramatization of the word 'unease'...

I remember reading (God knows where) someone's shaggy-dog story about this film. Apparently, this individual had a friend (as people who tell these kind of stories tend to) who went to see 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' sometime in the mid 1970s. He was late, there was the inevitable confusion, and he consequently spent the next two hours whimpering in fear - waiting for the chainsaw-wielding assassin to appear and rip into a bunch of immaculately attired Edwardian schoolgirls.

This is probably as good an analogy as any for the sense of dread this film (fitfully) manages to accumulate. Watching it is like seeing weather systems build. Small increments appear, converge on other increments, circling each other ambiguously before merging into a grey, baleful mass that sits there on the horizon, making atmospheric noises. In 'Picnic...' the wind moves plangently through eucalypts, clocks tick, an orphan girl is the victim of snobbish behaviour, girls gossip, more clocks tick, the wind moves through more eucalypts, the clocks stop, something 'unspeakably eerie' happens, and that's pretty much it.

Ultimately, the film is about Peter Weir placing markers of European culture - corsets, watches, a locally built replica of an Eighteenth century English manor - in the vast, contoured, deeply ambivalent Australian hinterland, and letting his camera record the absurdity of those spatial relationships. His early twentieth century Australians anxiously encircle themselves with the accoutrements of civilization they've brought with them - its dress codes, its class politics, its architectural styles - as if shielding their bodies from the unfamiliar landscape outside. Yet their attempts to maintain a European identity by 'keeping up appearances' come off as merely obsessional.

The elaborate dresses the girls wear, the formalities observed at the picnic (and at a surreal dinner party set on a flat, sunblasted lake edge - a Seurat painting gone horribly wrong), far from being emblems that mark a cultural continuity unifying Australia with Europe, seem oddly fetishistic - deeply arbitrary. Weir's characters seem to sense this meaninglessness also; they're enervated, without conviction. They seem to realize that, in bearing items of European material culture within this new environment, they're merely in possession of a bunch of dead letters - signifiers rendered powerless (decontextualized) by distance. As more than one character remarks, 'it all looks different here'.

To add to the unease, Weir intercuts all this with shots of the landscape - huge, forested, confrontationally empty. There's a sense of something staring back, unimpressed, 'personified' by the oddly biomorphic shapes within Hanging Rock itself.

One can still feel the reverberations, twenty five years on. There are definite echoes of 'Picnic...' in 'The Piano', 'The Virgin Suicides', and the whole slew of films that erstwhile Antipodean Sam Neill rather dodgily categorises the 'Cinema of Unease'. If you really want to freak yourself out, try watching this and 'The Quiet Earth' in the same sitting. You may never feel absolute faith in your ties to the physical universe again.

Details

Official Sites:

Criterion Collection [United States] Criterion Forum 2 [United States]

Country:

Australia

Language:

English French

Release Date:

2 February 1979 (USA)

Also Known As:

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Filming Locations:

Mount Diogenes, Hanging Rock Reserve, Woodend, Victoria, Australia

Box Office

Budget:

AUD440,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$27,492, 28 June 1998

Gross USA:

$49,582

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$82,361

Company Credits

Production Co:

British Empire Films Australia, The South Australian Film Corporation, The Australian Film Commission

Technical Specs

Runtime:

115 min 107 min (1998 director's cut)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1