#30 We just watched this on Netflix streaming.

You should too!:  Picnic at Hanging Rock

The Film: Picnic at Hanging Rock

If you want to find good movies, picking through the first films of great directors is a pretty good start. You’ll usually find something pretty good and, at the very least, interesting. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock was not his first feature, but it was the one that launched his career onto the international stage. I’ve never seen The Cars That Ate Paris, but I’ll have to dig it up sometime.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is typical, in a broad sense, of Peter Weir’s work. He tends to analyze an individual or group that is placed in an unusual place or culture. I’m not going to go into every fucking movie where Weir does this, just look it up.

Moreover, Picnic at Hanging Rock is really, really, strange. The movie is a supposed true story involving a group of school girls in Australia in February 1900. They visit a location called Hanging Rock for a picnic and some of them go missing. A mystery forms around these girls, the events of that day, and even the administration of the girl’s school.

Why to watch it: It is style over substance.

Style over substance is always where great filmmakers shine. The problem with saying that is people assume I mean there is no substance. That would be style without substance. The two are very different. Weir is not interested in the meaning of this movie’s plot points or story. He cares about creating an atmosphere and a feeling. The first half of the movie is absolutely fascinating. There is a strong sense of impending tragedy. A strong sense of otherness. This is all comprised of Weir’s use of camera angles, music, dialogue, and patience.

In my favorite sequence of the entire movie, one of the boys is seeing a vision of one of the girls in the woods. He pans across the woods and sees a swan, which flies away. The camera pauses on the water, now absent of animal. That pause is long and deliberate. What a shockingly abstract group of shots. Did the girl enter nature and turn into an animal? Is it a dream? What the fuck is going on!?

Pay attention to this: The music

I’m sure it’s too easy to point to the music as one of the strongest elements of Weir’s film, but I’m doing just that. The music is a huge part of adding an abstract, surreal quality to the movie. When the girls first approach the Hanging Rock, the film takes a strange turn. The camera becomes exploratory, almost…indifferent to the girls in their current location. It does this while switching back to almost voyeuristic shots of girls and their chaperone.

Another great shot in the movie is of their chaperone quietly reading her book and the camera points up toward the rocks. The shot has an auditory, hollow rumble in the background and we sense from the shot timings and music that literally anything could happen.

The movie is left, literally, totally open for interpretation. There are suspects present at the time of the disappearance. There are bizarre sexual references, such as the school teacher/chaperone was in her underwear when the fat girl was running back. This is a Lynch movie before there was such a thing as a Lynch movie. The difference is that Lynch launches his universe in a space and time that likely does not exist. Weir launches it in reality, but uses great film technique and sound design to show there is something very bizarre going on.

I actually read the ending which was cut from the movie’s source material (novel of the same name) and I know what actually happened. However, it isn’t nearly as fun as the impenetrable narrative that Weir builds.

A-/5

-Collin.