Picnic at Hanging Rock was a commercial and critical success, and helped draw international attention to the then-emerging Australian New Wave of cinema.
Plot
On Valentine's Day, 1900, students from Appleyard College, a girls' private school in Victoria, Australia, embark on a picnic to Hanging Rock, led by the headmistress Mrs. Appleyard, Miss Greta McCraw, and Mlle. de Poitiers. Orphan Sara, deeply attached to her roommate Miranda, is forced to stay behind with Miss Lumley.
At the Rock, Miranda, Marion, Irma, and Edith explore its crevices, soon falling asleep under a strange influence. Edith awakes in terror and flees as the others proceed into a hidden crevice. When the picnic group returns, Miss McCraw and the three girls are missing, plunging Sara into despair. A search yields no clues, despite Edith's fragmented accounts of the girls' disappearance and a mysterious red cloud.
Michael Fitzhubert, a young Englishman who spotted the girls, is haunted by the mystery and conducts his own search. He finds Irma alive but confused, with no memory of the event. The disappearance causes a scandal, leading to students leaving the school and spreading unrest.
As the school's reputation suffers, Mrs. Appleyard informs Sara her tuition has not been paid, signaling her return to an orphanage. Sara, already distressed by Miranda's disappearance, is further traumatized. Irma, recovered but amnesiac, faces the wrath of her classmates demanding answers about the missing girls.
Sara's body is later found dead in a greenhouse, believed to have jumped from the roof. Mrs. Appleyard, facing the collapse of her school and haunted by the events, is found dead at the base of Hanging Rock, having apparently fallen while climbing it.
The film ends with a voiceover during a flashback to the picnic day, stating that the disappearances of Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw remain unsolved mysteries, continuing to haunt the local community.
The novel was published in 1967. Reading it four years later, Patricia Lovell thought it would make a great film. She did not originally think of producing it herself until Phillip Adams suggested she try it; she optioned the film rights in 1973, paying $100 for three months.[3] She hired Peter Weir to direct on the basis of his film Homesdale, and Weir brought in Hal and Jim McElroy to help produce.[1]
Screenwriter David Williamson originally was chosen to adapt the film, but was unavailable and recommended noted TV writer Cliff Green.[4] Joan Lindsay had approval over who did the adaptation and she gave it to Green, whose first draft Lovell says was "excellent".[3]
Martindale Hall (located near Mintaro in South Australia), was the location for Appleyard Hall, the school featured in the film.
Filming began in February 1975 with principal photography taking six weeks.[5][6] Locations included Hanging Rock in Victoria, Martindale Hall near Mintaro in rural South Australia, and at the studio of the South Australian Film Corporation in Adelaide.
The film's mise-en-scène and cinematography was strongly influenced by the work of the Heidelberg School of Australian impressionists, active in Victoria in the 1880s and 1890s. Leading Heidelberg School member Frederick McCubbin also lived in and often painted the Macedon Ranges, the setting and filming location of Picnic at Hanging Rock.[7] To achieve the look of an impressionist painting for the film, director Weir and director of cinematography Russell Boyd were inspired by the work of British photographer and film director David Hamilton, who had draped different types of veils over his camera lens to produce diffused and soft-focus images.[6] Boyd created the ethereal, dreamy look of many scenes by placing simple bridal veil fabric of various thicknesses over his camera lens.[4][6] The film was edited by Max Lemon.
Casting
Weir originally cast Ingrid Mason as Miranda, but realised after several weeks of rehearsals that it was "not working" and cast Anne-Louise Lambert. Mason was persuaded to remain in the role of a minor character by producer Patricia Lovell.[4] The role of Mrs. Appleyard was originally to have been taken by Vivien Merchant; Merchant fell ill and Rachel Roberts was cast at short notice.[1] Several of the schoolgirls' voices were dubbed in secret by professional voice actors, as Weir had cast the young actresses for their innocent appearance rather than their acting ability.[8] The voice actors were not credited, although more than three decades later, actress Barbara Llewellyn revealed that she had provided the voice for all the dialogue of Edith (Christine Schuler, now Christine Lawrance).[8][9]
Music
The main title music was derived from two traditional Romanian panpipe pieces: "Doina: Sus Pe Culmea Dealului" and "Doina Lui Petru Unc" with Romanian Gheorghe Zamfir playing the panpipe (or panflute) and Swiss born Marcel Cellier the organ. Australian composer Bruce Smeaton also provided several original compositions (The Ascent Music and The Rock) written for the film.[4]
There is currently no official soundtrack commercially available. In 1976, CBS released a vinyl LP titled "A Theme from Picnic at Hanging Rock", a track of the same name and "Miranda's Theme". A 7" single was released in 1976 of the Picnic at Hanging Rock theme by the Nolan-Buddle Quartet. The song peaked at number 15 on the Australian singles chart.[10]
An album Flute de Pan et Orgue (Music from Picnic at Hanging Rock) was released by Festival Records France.
Theatrical release
The film premiered on 8 August 1975, at the Hindley Cinema Complex in Adelaide. It was well received by audiences and critics alike.[6] It grossed $5,120,000 in box office sales in Australia.[11] This is equivalent to $40,863,759 in 2022.
In 1998, Weir removed seven minutes from the film for a theatrical re-release, creating a shorter 107-minute director's cut.[4]
Reception
Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways."
Weir recalled that when the film was first screened in the United States, American audiences were disturbed by the fact that the mystery remained unsolved. According to Weir, "One distributor threw his coffee cup at the screen at the end of it, because he'd wasted two hours of his life—a mystery without a goddamn solution!"[4] Critic Vincent Canby noted this reaction among audiences in a 1979 review of the film, in which he discussed the film's elements of artistic "Australian horror romance", albeit one without the cliches of a conventional horror film.[12]
Despite this, the film was a critical success, with American film critic Roger Ebert calling it "a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria" and remarked that it "employs two of the hallmarks of modern Australian films: beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home."[13]
Cliff Green stated in interview that "Writing the film and later through its production, did I—or anyone else—predict that it would become Australia's most loved movie? We always knew it was going to be good—but that good? How could we?"[5]
Picnic at Hanging Rock currently has an approval rating of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 48 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Visually mesmerizing, Picnic at Hanging Rock is moody, unsettling, and enigmatic -- a masterpiece of Australian cinema and a major early triumph for director Peter Weir".[14] Metacritic, another review aggregator, gives the film a score of 81/100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[15]
The director's cut was released on DVD in the US by the Criterion Collection on 3 November 1998. This release featured a new transfer of the film, a theatrical trailer and liner notes. The Criterion Collection released the director's cut on Blu-ray in the US on 17 June 2014. It includes a paperback copy of the novel and a number of featurettes.
In the UK, the film was released in a special 3-disc DVD set on 30 June 2008. This set included both the director's cut and the longer original cut, the feature-length documentary A Dream Within a Dream, deleted scenes, interviews with the filmmakers and the book's author Joan Lindsay, poster and still galleries,. UK distributor Second Sight Films released the film on Blu-ray in the UK on 26 July 2010.[16][17]
In Australia it was released on DVD by Umbrella Entertainment in August 2007, and re-released in a 2-disc Collector's Edition in May 2011. This edition includes special features including theatrical trailers, poster and still galleries, documentaries and interviews with cast, crew and Joan Lindsay.[18] It was released on Blu-ray in Australia by Umbrella Entertainment on 12 May 2010, including the feature-length documentary A Dream Within a Dream, a 25-minute on-set documentary titled A Recollection: Hanging Rock 1900 and the theatrical trailer.[19]
Legacy and influence
Picnic at Hanging Rock was voted the best Australian film of all time by members of the Australian Film Institute, industry guilds and unions, film critics and reviewers, academics and media teachers, and Kookaburra Card members of the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), in a 1996 poll organised by the Victorian Centenary of Cinema Committee and the NFSA.[20][21][22]
The film has gone on to inspire other more recent artists, who have come to regard the film for its themes as well as its unique visuals.
Director Sofia Coppola has borrowed heavily from Picnic at Hanging Rock for her productions of The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette.[23] Both films, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, deal extensively with themes of death and femininity as well as adolescent perceptions of love and sexuality.[24][25]
American television writer Damon Lindelof said that the film was an influence on the second season of the television show The Leftovers.[26]
My Kingdom for a Chocolate Blancmange! A tragedy in fifty thousand acts. With apologies to William Shakespeare, Thornton Wilder and some very fine artists (1948)
