In the early 1900s, Miranda attends a girls boarding school in Australia. One Valentine's Day, the school's typically strict headmistress treats the girls to a picnic field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, Miranda and several other girls venture off. It's not until the end of the day that the faculty realizes the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared mysteriously.
11 Dec Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Charming by Watching
Australians pride themselves on being direct, but Australian cinema is anything but. It is one of the most engaging trends in film today and — so far as I can tell — we first see it here. Actually we first see an inkling in “Walkabout,: a film set in Australia but by a Brit. It conflated constructed realities, Aboriginal mysticism embedded in the environment, and adolescent sexual awakening as metaphor for narrative awareness,
That film made overt negative comment on the (then popular) Italian philosophy of film as stories embedded in characters.
This is very much the same film, except the conceptual distance between it and “Walkabout” is the same as between “Walkabout” and “Amarcord.” It is a remarkably sophisticated idea: to create a drama with essentially no story arc, where the characters are not prime movers but elements of the environment — where sex has less to do with panting and ejaculation and more with universal intimacy, what we see and some unnamed yearning that we all recognise.
This is a film that changed the world, but my own theory is that it reflects rather than leads a larger awareness among Australian artists. And that all comes from one or two teachers at the Opera House, which in turn was awakened by the implied hidden forms in the design of that structure.
The idea is that film is not a play, that what you experience is not what the players show — instead what they help you show yourself in your imagination. We can see this in the folded acting of Winslet and Kidman, in the projection into the next scene of Crowe. In the several mystical spaces of secrets Blanchett ephemerally sustains.
Many films along these lines fail, I’m thinking of Gillian Armstrong, Sally Potter and Jane Campion. Even this film is not widely admired and Weir himself evolved into “message” films. But thanks to Australia and New Zealand we have a particular approach to film that is cinematic. It tussles for control over our imagination with other memes in film: the Hollywood “film as play,” the British “film as set,” the Italian “film as characters,” the Swedish “film as visited angst,” the Hong Kong “film as ballet,”
What we have here in the Australian entry is closer to the Japanese “film as means to abstraction whereby one purifies reality by alert immersion.”
One trick that I particularly appreciate is the focus on reading and how that is tied to what we think are clues to the mystery. We see a teacher in the wild reading a geometry text. We see the geometry text clearly; the camera dwells on a particular graphic which in a British/Hitchcock film means: “pay attention, here is something that will be important later on.” Then we switch to an overhead shot of the girls in trance on a rock. They are carefully arrayed. This is a staged scene, which obviously relates to the drawing in the book. Subconsciously that part of our mind that is tracking the mystery is racing ahead. Simultaneously, that part of our eye that makes sense of patterns is puzzled.
None of this is ever closed and that makes the effect much more powerful. Not only was the clue never resolved, the hands holding it disappeared — as if we charmed the scene into mischief by our watching.
Posted in 2003
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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