Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Director: Peter Weir
Starring: Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Anne-Louise Lambert

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

Picnic at Hanging Rock takes a page from the book of Hitchcock; it infuses familiar events wih ominous overtones. The camera lingers on a heart-shaped cake sliced down the middle. Watches stop precisely at noon. Ants crawl over a slice of cake. These events become portends of darker future events. Again and again we look at Hanging Rock, and the Rock stares back.

Weir allows for plenty of creativity in the reading of Hanging Rock. In my notes alone, I have readings of the Rock ranging from simply The Primal to the unconscious to sentient. I think my final reading has parts of all three.

The film opens with the famous Edgar Allen Poe quotation:

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Indeed, the film and the characters within obey a logic incongruent with the logic the waking universe obeys. Time stops or is inconsequential. The girls who are lost to the Rock follow some extra-sensory siren call into the heart of its crags. It's clear that something calls to the people who disappear that we aren't privy to, and this is disturbing in ways that are hard to understand explain. Maybe it's the absence of a "why", unapologetically being confronted with the irrational.

Picnic at Hanging Rock obviously draws comparisons with Antonioni works like L'Avventura and Blow-Up where characters literally disappear according to some otherworldly logic, or worse, according to no logic at all. These films offer a vacuum of reason, and, like the universe, we abhor it and must fill it. But Hanging Rock is the abyss and it is staring back.

July 16
apartment TV, early morning

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