Recencies van critici

For those watching Weir’s film today, as Australia still struggles to acknowledge its bloody colonial past, the unspoken violence resounds, as does the absurdity of Applewood Hall, surrounded by bush and closed off from the world so its corseted students can be educated in skills such as poetry and ballet.

Even as human desire (for total knowledge, possession, sex, and even oblivion) brings about very real horrors in life, however, Weir doesn't soften the rampant fear of death and the beyond. His sun-hued, bucolic images, sculpted by music by Bruce Smeaton, Gheorghe Zamfir, and Marcel Cellier, along with Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, convey nature's eerie, ambivalent power over all.

The opening frames of [the] film contrast the natural permanence of Hanging Rock with the man-made elevation of Appleyard College. This has led viewers to read the immutability of the landscape against the transience of the imperial project and settler ideology represented by the girls’ school. It is curious that an institution for girls run by a widow could be said to stand for rapacious white Australia, but its veneer of civilisation is soon scratched to reveal horror, neglect and chaos...

However you dress it—as the earthbound B-side of a Surrealist dream-film, as a koan-puzzle whose very lack of a solution is the source of its beauty, as a drowsy parable on childhood’'s end and feminine unattainableness—Weir's career-making sophomore film has the unquantifiable allure of an opium jag.

While many films encourage viewers to solve their mysteries, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK asks them to accept it. In contrast, the film's characters cannot face the unknown, and their reactions in turn obscure them from each other and from us. For Weir, Hanging Rock holds the last memory of Irma, Marion, and Miranda, yet no one can interpret what nature recounts.

Director Peter Weir struggles to create an atmosphere of mystical languor, dissolving his actors in blinding sunlight and filling his sound track with the faintly ominous rustles of nature. But the deenergized drama leads only to anticlimax, as Weir suggests much more than he shows and invites the audience to fill in the meanings.

I believe Picnic at Hanging Rock to be the finest film of its kind produced in Australia. Its excellence is typical of the classics of the fantasy genre, such as Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943) – films as much, if not more, about themselves and their shifting, disorientating relationship with the spectator, as about a world full of mysterious events.