KT 106: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
Bella Suckling returns to analyse a gothic classic
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
Peter Weir, 1975
DCP Courtesy: Picnic Productions
Classification: PG
Screening in both arthouse and multiplex screens
Words by Bella Suckling
Australia’s pre-eminent auteur and poster boy for what would become known as the 1970s Film Revival ‘down under’ — Peter Weir — challenged what constituted high art in Australian film financing with his 1975 film Picnic At Hanging Rock. At once a parable for Australia’s mythologised colonial roots it has become a cultish masterpiece within his vast oeuvre. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary restoration screenings around Melbourne (and the world) Bella Suckling takes a deep dive into the film. You can catch the film this week at Cinema Nova on Thursday and Sunday at 1.30pm and Tuesday at 4.45pm — tix here!
Peter Weir’s beautiful 1974 film Picnic at Hanging Rock is textured with references to antiquity – cherubs, cupids, goddesses. The most famous and recurrent of these references is to Botticelli's Birth of Venus – that endlessly reproduced image of a beautiful nude woman (sorry, goddess) with long, fertile hair, emerging from a shell. It is an image of awakening, a blooming. Early on in the film, one character says to another: ‘she’s one of Botticelli's angels.’ We then see repeated images of Botticelli's famous painting, illustrations of the Venus are printed out in notebooks and pinned onto walls.
It is not the Botticelli that I remember now, thinking about Picnic. Instead, another painting that appears later in the film, although only for a moment, lingers on my mind. I think of a brief shot of a reproduction of Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June. In the painting, a woman curls over herself, asleep. She rests her head on her forearm, her foot is arched on the ground. Her orange dress is translucent, her left nipple is revealed. In the background, an oleander plant crawls over the balcony behind her. In the distance: the ocean, illuminated by the mid-afternoon light.
I’ve always felt a certain girlish and sentimental attachment to Flaming June – its sensuality and vision of summer languor. Something in the tone of my attachment changed when I saw the painting in the flesh for the first time earlier this year. It struck something in my body, maybe somewhere in my chest. It evoked a feeling I can’t quite approximate – somewhere between delight and peace, surrender, an awareness of the sublime. A soothing feeling, like sighing out slowly through your nose. Now, reminded of the painting, I wonder if something in the tenor of the image – its languor, its hazy and dream-like atmosphere, its particular view of femininity, its connection between beauty and the sublime – is present, too, in Weir’s recently restored Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel of the same name, Picnic at Hanging Rock follows a group of schoolgirls and their teachers on a fateful Valentine’s Day outing to Hanging Rock, in the 1900 – one year before Australia’s federation. Despite the warnings of their headmistress, four girls from the Appleyard School venture up the monolith. They are led by the beautiful and enigmatic Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), the girl described by her French teacher as ‘one of Botticelli's angels.’ Only one of them – the frumpy and grating Edith (Christine Schuler) – returns. Their austere maths teacher Miss McGraw (Vivean Gray) also disappears into the rock. What follows is the fall out from the girl’s disappearance. Weeks later, another one of the girls, Irma (Karen Robson), is found, alive, at the rock. She has no recollection of what has happened to her or where her classmates have gone. The other three never return, and the mystery of their disappearance is never solved.
Picnic, in my mind, is more about the connection between the erotic and the mystical, even the divine, than it is about suspense or mystery. To sketch out this idea, I’d like to focus in particular on the first third of Picnic, prior to the disappearance of the four girls and their teacher. In the film’s first moments, we hear the voice of Miranda, loosely quoting Edgar Allen Poe: ‘what we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.’ We then enter the world of Appleyard College – an Italianate mansion that is an anachronism in central Victoria, that imposes Europeanness on the bush that surrounds it. Here, we are voyeurs to the student’s lives, to their trinkets and their habits, to their little monuments to beauty. As a pan flute plays softly, we watch them brush their hair, wash their faces in basins filled with flowers, loop and tighten each other's corsets, press daisies and admire themselves in the mirror. These images are hazy and gauzy – a veil was draped over the camera to achieve this effect. As Megan Abbott writes for Criterion, ‘from its beginning, Picnic is about watching, looking, about the gaze itself.’ Everything about the visual world of Picnic is girlish: virginial white cotton and muslim, floral wallpaper, coloured ribbons and butterfly belts and plaited hair. Even the day the picnic takes place – Saint Valentine’s – seems a vessel for girly sentimentality and yearning. Perhaps for this reason, in its painterly and dream-like first third, Picnic reminded me of the work of Sofia Coppola, particularly The Virgin Suicides. Both films show us hazy images of blonde girls in white dresses;both are interested in gaze – in watching and being watched; both depict female sexuality as controlled and bound by outside forces (in Picnic by Victorian mores; in The Virgin Suicides by strict bourgeouis parents) and both document attempts to break free of these controls. In both films, the filmmakers depict beauty as a principle that can organise and elevate teenage girlhood. And in both films, this vision of tragic beauty both delights us and implicates us in the demise of those characters who embody it.
There is a very tactile, libidinal charge throughout Picnic at Hanging Rock, much of it localised to the character of Miranda. Like the Botticelli or Flaming June, in the character of Miranda, Weir (and Lindsay before him) renders beauty and sensuality as sublime, even holy. As Chris Conti notes in the Sydney Review of Books, the ‘unreasoning love radiating from Miranda represents the union of beauty and goodness, of erotic and agapic love, that outstrips the straitlaced regime of Appleyard.’ Miranda is often shown bathed in light, almost as if a halo has formed around her crown. Some sexual precociousness is also implied in Miranda; we are told this sexuality might be tied to some innate mysticism or spiritualistic ‘knowing.’ With her preternatural beauty, she haunts all those who get close to her; she inspires strong projections. Miranda warns her friend Sara (Margaret Nelson), whose attachment to her is strong and seemingly homoerotic, that she ‘must learn to love someone else’ because she ‘won’t be here much longer.’ Picnic is also charged with the eroticism of restriction and taboo – sex and beauty bound and controlled by Victorian moralism and prudishness. When the group of schoolgirls arrive at the bottom of the rock, they are allowed to remove their hats and gloves. When the four girls venture up the rock, they remove their shoes and stockings entirely, they are barefoot. The implication here is seemingly that the rock itself is doing away with those restrictions, releasing the girls from their pressues. As Anna Backman Rogers writes, the film is ‘affectively melancholic’ because we know that youthful beauty will always be fleeting in one way or another. Perhaps it will be stymied by repressive social codes, perhaps it will be thwarted by violence. Or perhaps it will just fade. Backman Rogers tells us that: ‘in Picnic, the ripening of female youthfulness is inextricably bound up with loss and death.’
Picnic at Hanging Rock also implicates itself in colonial myths and erasures. The film sets up the ‘Europeanness’ of the girls – their whiteness, their blondeness, the Italianate mansion they live in – against the seeming wildness and unknowability of the Australian bush. It performs colonial tropes of white victimhood and innocence. Chris Conti writes in the Sydney Review of Books that ‘in the iconic image of virgins rising the prehistoric monolith, long suppressed fears of a devilish menace in the Australian landmass, aroused by the presence of colonial intruders and intent on sacrificial retribution, rise to the surface.’ Picnic also superimposes an entirely European perspective over a setting that is… not European. The very fact of the girls living at Appleyard College, the fact of their visiting Hanging Rock, is predicated on recent colonial violence. The film, and the book that preceded it, can’t quite face this historical reality. The history of the Macedon area is the history of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung groups who traditionally lived on the land. The more recent history of the area – the very history that this film superimposes itself over – is of the frontier wars that displaced and massacred these First Nations groups and the ongoing legacy of that violence.
Listings | Thursday 20 March - Wednesday 26 March
Notable Screenings
Ange & the Boss: Puskas in Australia
Cam Fink, Rob Heath & Tony Wilson, 2024
Screening Sat, Sun & Tue at Thornbury Picture House
The Cats of Gokogu Shrine
Kazuhiro Soda, 2024
Advance Screening at Cinema Nova and Palace Pentridge
Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF)
Program and tix available here
New Films in Release
Bob Trevino Likes It
Tracie Laymon, 2024
Screening Daily
The Return
Uberto Pasolini, 2024
Screening Daily
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Daily
MWFF
MWFF Opening Night: We Were Dangerous
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, 2024
Screening Thursday
Freshly Squeezed Shorts 1
Various
Screening Sat
Next Gen Shorts
Various
Screening Sat
The Almost Midnight Movie Marathon
Alice Maio Mackay & Sasha Rainbow
Screening Sat
Freshly Squeezed Shorts 2
Various
Screening Sunday
Focus on Andrea Arnold
Bird
Andrea Arnold, 2024
Screening Sun
Fish Tank
Andrea Arnold, 2009
Screening Sat
Top Screen
Top Screen: Premiere Screening
Various
Screening Fri
Matinees
All We Imagine As Light
Payal Kapadia, 2024
Screening Fri, Sat, Sun
No screening this week
No screening this week
Goodfellas
Martin Scorsese, 1990
Screening Daily
The Lady Eve
Preston Sturges, 1941
Screening Sat and Sun
Army of Shadows
Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969
Screening Sun
BBBC CINEMA (GALLERYGALLERY BRUNSWICK)
Closed until further notice
No screening this week
CHINATOWN CINEMA
Ne Zha 2
Yang Yu, 2025
Screening Daily
Hit n Fun
Mak Kai Kwong, 2025
Screening Daily
Detective Chinatown 1900
Chen Sicheng & Dai Mo, 2025
Screening Daily
Coming back in some variety soon
No screening this week
Events / Previews
Meet The Filmmaker: Wilding
Isabella Tree, 2025
Screening tonight at 7pm
The Cats of Gokogu Shrine
Kazuhiro Soda, 2024
Advance Screening Fri - Sun
Oh, Canada
Paul Schrader, 2024
Screening Fri
Dog Day Afternoon
Sidney Lumet, 1975
Screening Fri, Sat, Sun, Wed
Darkman
Sam Raimi, 1990
Screening Sat
The Fall
Tarsem Singh, 2006
Screening Thu, Fri, Sun
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Peter Weir, 1975
Screening Thu, Sun and Tue
Master and Commander: Far Side Of The World
Peter Weir, 2003
Screening Tue
New Release
Bob Trevino Likes It
Tracie Laymon, 2024
Screening Daily
The Return
Uberto Pasolini, 2024
Screening Daily
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Daily
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Ange and the Boss: Puskas in Australia
Cam Fink & Tony Wilson, 2024
Screening Daily
Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho, 2025
Screening Daily
Hard Truths
Mike Leigh, 2024
Screening Daily
Spit
Jonathan Teplitzky, 2025
Werekend Previews
Dahomey
Mati Diop, 2024
Screening Daily
Inside
Charles Williams, 2024
Screening Daily
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024
Screening Daily
I’m Still Here
Walter Salles, 2024
Screening Daily
The Last Journey
Filip Hammar, Fredrik Wikingsson, 2024
Screening Daily
The Porcelain War
Slava Leontyev, Brendan Bellomo, 2024
Screening Daily
Bird
Andrea Arnold, 2024
Screening Daily
The Last Showgirl
Gia Coppola, 2024
Screening Daily
Soundtrack to a Coup D ‘État
Johan Grimonprez, 2024
Screening Daily
Black Box Diaries
Shiori Ito, 2024
Screening Daily
Grand Tour
Miguel Gomes, 2024
Screening Daily
Queer
Luca Guadanigno, 2024
Screening Daily
Babygirl
Halina Reijn, 2024
Screening Daily
A Complete Unknown
James Mangold, 2024
Screening Daily
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet, 2024
Screening Daily
Presence
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Becoming Led Zeppelin
Bernard MacMahon, 2025
Screening Daily
Conclave
Edward Berger, 2024
Screening Daily
Nosferatu
David Eggers, 2024
Screening Daily
Anora
Sean Baker, 2024
Screening Daily
Sing Sing
Greg Kwedar, 2025
Screening Daily
Emilia Perez
Jacques Audiard, 2025
Screening Daily
The Substance
Coralie Fargeat, 2024
Screening Daily
DOGMILK DEGUSTATIONS: @ Miscellania
No screening this week
No screening this week
GAY24 (Bar Flippy’s)
Between Seven and One
Christina Petropoulos, 1997
+
Dinner Party
Lisa Cholodenko, 1997
+
Afternoon Breezes
Hitoshi Yazaki, 1980
Screening Wednesday March 26 from 7:30pm
Cool Devices #3
Various Artists, 2025
Screening Wednesday March 26 from 6pm at Trades Hall Carlton
LIDO / CLASSIC / CAMEO
Events
Check website for rep titles!
General Release
Bob Trevino Likes It
Tracie Laymon, 2024
Screening Daily
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Daily
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho, 2025
Screening Daily
Inside
Charles Williams, 2024
Screening Daily
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024
Screening Daily
I’m Still Here
Walter Salles, 2024
Screening Daily
The Last Journey
Filip Hammar, Fredrik Wikingsson, 2024
Screening Daily
Bird
Andrea Arnold, 2024
Screening Daily
The Last Showgirl
Gia Coppola, 2024
Screening Daily
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Michael Morris, 2025
Screening Daily
A Complete Unknown
James Mangold, 2024
Screening Daily
Queer
Luca Guadanigno, 2024
Screening Daily
Babygirl
Halina Reijn, 2024
Screening Daily
Grand Tour
Miguel Gomes, 2024
Screening Daily
Widow Clicquot
Paul Verhoeven, 2023
Screening Daily
Conclave
Edward Berger, 2024
Screening Daily
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet, 2024
Screening Daily
Nosferatu
David Eggers, 2024
Screening Daily
Anora
Sean Baker, 2024
Screening Daily
We Live in Time
John Crowley, 2024
Screening Daily
A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg, 2024
Screening Daily
OVA CLUB
No screening this week
No screening this week — we will report back ASAP
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: SCREENING IDEAS
No screening this week
PALACE BALWYN / BRIGHTON / COMO / KINO / PENTRIDGE / MOONEE PONDS / WESTGARTH
Events / Previews
Alliance Française French Film Festival
Program and tickets available here
The Cats of Gokogu Shrine
Kazuhiro Soda, 2024
Advance Screening at Palace Pentridge Fri and Sat
General Release
The Return
Uberto Pasolini, 2024
Screening Daily
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Daily
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho, 2025
Screening Daily
Inside
Charles Williams, 2024
Screening Daily
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024
Screening Daily
I’m Still Here
Walter Salles, 2024
Screening Daily
The Last Journey
Filip Hammar, Fredrik Wikingsson, 2024
Screening Daily
Bird
Andrea Arnold, 2024
Screening Daily
The Last Showgirl
Gia Coppola, 2024
Screening Daily
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Michael Morris, 2025
Screening Daily
A Complete Unknown
James Mangold, 2024
Screening Daily
Queer
Luca Guadanigno, 2024
Screening Daily
Babygirl
Halina Reijn, 2024
Screening Daily
Widow Clicquot
Paul Verhoeven, 2023
Screening Daily
Presence
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Conclave
Edward Berger, 2024
Screening Daily
Nosferatu
David Eggers, 2024
Screening Daily
Anora
Sean Baker, 2024
Screening Daily
Wicked
John M. Chu, 2024
Screening Daily
Film installation and book launch by Lucas Haynes.
Haynes presents new works of film and photography from his residency in Indonesia.
Opening Friday 21st from 6-8pm, and then Saturday and Sunday 12-4
Upstairs
1b Marine Parade
Abbotsford
No screening this week
THE MELBOURNE CINÉMATHÈQUE (ACMI)
Out of the Past and into the Flares: Neo-Noir in ‘70s America
The Long Goodbye
Robert Altman, 1973
Screening from 7pm
+
Dirty Harri
Don Siegel, 1971
Screening from 9.10pm
Disappear Here + Filmmaker Q and A
Ben de Hoedt, 2025
Screening Fri and Sat
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh, 2024
Screening Sat
Ange & the Boss: Puskas in Australia
Cam Fink, Rob Heath & Tony Wilson, 2024
Screening Sat, Sun & Tue
I’m Still Here
Walter Salles, 2024
Screening Sun and Wed
Wild Zero
Tetsuro Takeuchi, 1999
Screening Mon & Tue
Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho, 2025
Screening Fri, Sun & Wed
The Last Journey
Filip Hammar, Fredrik Wikingsson, 2024
Screening Wed
Becoming Led Zeppelin
Bernard MacMahon, 2025
Screening Sun
Hard Truths
Mike Leigh, 2024
Screening Wed & Sat
UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ Thornbury Picture House
No Screening this week