Piconic At Hanging Rock Analysis
New Australian Cinema (1980)
Edited by Scott Murray
Material on Picnic at Hanging Rock
Picnic enjoyed the greatest popular and critical success of the three (movies), but it is not a film which grows richer in recollection; occasionally it seems to find visual style an end it itself, and its central enigma (What did happen at Hanging Rock on St. Valentine's Day, 1900?) has to fight for attention with the film's pervasive sense of a smothered sexuality. The parallel suggested between the surface of giggling excited schoolgirls, with its suggestions of real but repressed desire, and the surface beauty of the Australian scene, with its lurking horror, could well have been developed further by Cliff Green in his otherwise capable screenplay. (p.62)
True works of fantasy-perhaps among the richest of films-are open-ended, suspending …show more content…
What are they to make of Sara and Albert (John Jaratt), brother and sister orphans who, separated in life, are touched by the mystery of the rock? Sara pines for her brother while she is alone; Albert seems to have a vision in a dream (coincidence or telepathy?) as Sara, utterly desolate at the loss of Miranda and unable to remain at Appleyard college, kills herself.
Other relationships in the film are left ambiguous. As Mrs. Appleyard becomes more and more distraught, she confesses to Mlle de Poitiers her total dependence on Miss McCraw. Implied is a sexual attachment, the repression of which was so complete that it now expresses itself in revulsion: "She let herself be raped on that rock!" Similarly, Miranda's goodbye wave to Mlle de Poitiers suggests an important link between the two women that is never clarified.
Such details are left in abeyance, and thus suspends the audience in what the French call significance-traces of meaning, fragments of sense, but never a coherent, fixed, final truth delivered easily to us by the film's
Edited by Scott Murray
Material on Picnic at Hanging Rock
Picnic enjoyed the greatest popular and critical success of the three (movies), but it is not a film which grows richer in recollection; occasionally it seems to find visual style an end it itself, and its central enigma (What did happen at Hanging Rock on St. Valentine's Day, 1900?) has to fight for attention with the film's pervasive sense of a smothered sexuality. The parallel suggested between the surface of giggling excited schoolgirls, with its suggestions of real but repressed desire, and the surface beauty of the Australian scene, with its lurking horror, could well have been developed further by Cliff Green in his otherwise capable screenplay. (p.62)
True works of fantasy-perhaps among the richest of films-are open-ended, suspending …show more content…
What are they to make of Sara and Albert (John Jaratt), brother and sister orphans who, separated in life, are touched by the mystery of the rock? Sara pines for her brother while she is alone; Albert seems to have a vision in a dream (coincidence or telepathy?) as Sara, utterly desolate at the loss of Miranda and unable to remain at Appleyard college, kills herself.
Other relationships in the film are left ambiguous. As Mrs. Appleyard becomes more and more distraught, she confesses to Mlle de Poitiers her total dependence on Miss McCraw. Implied is a sexual attachment, the repression of which was so complete that it now expresses itself in revulsion: "She let herself be raped on that rock!" Similarly, Miranda's goodbye wave to Mlle de Poitiers suggests an important link between the two women that is never clarified.
Such details are left in abeyance, and thus suspends the audience in what the French call significance-traces of meaning, fragments of sense, but never a coherent, fixed, final truth delivered easily to us by the film's