“Only a million years ago,” a teacher says of the formation of the eponymous landmark of Picnic at Hanging Rock as she escorts schoolgirls there on a field trip. Like that mass of volcanic stone, Peter Weir’s 40-year-old film is relatively young, yet it presents a timeless insolubility to all who approach it. Few films to break an artist into the mainstream have been as resolutely weird and deliberately confrontational to an audience’s sensibilities, though its critical appreciation and even box-office success (grossing 10 times its budget in Australia alone) are undeniable testaments to the instant draw it had on people even on its original release.
Seen today, it’s not hard to understand why. Weir’s command of the camera recalls that of a young Spielberg: classically ornate, but energetic and undisciplined enough to generate an immediate emotional reaction that can do more in a few minutes to define a context than a half-hour of exposition. In the opening minutes, elegant compositions and minimal camera movement establish the etiquette and propriety of an all-girl’s school, but hard cuts between shots create a sense of friction, adding a level of menace and façade to the young women’s interactions. Diagonally oriented blocking compounds this unease by suggesting power dynamics between the girls, singling out the pretty Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) as dominant among the students and ascribing a sense of weakness and social inferiority to the meek Sara (Margaret Nelson) before we even find out that she comes from a poor family.
In their rooms, the girls make fun of the teachers, but when the camera moves downstairs where one instructor calls the girls to leave for their trip, focal lengths distort the space behind the woman, elongating and shrinking the staircase in the background so that the teacher looms over the girls even when they enter the frame above her. In rapid succession, Weir delineates an entire power structure built upon repression and class, and even the pastoral pan flute prominently featured on the film’s soundtrack takes on a dark edge, eschewing the usual reliance upon didgeridoos and other Aboriginal music in Australian cinema to communicate primitivism to dig into the classical, European roots of the women, suggesting instinctual behavior barely contained by constrictive Victorian mores.
When the action shifts to Hanging Rock, Weir amplifies this budding malaise with low-angle vistas of the formation that animate the stone with unspeakable power. At times, the shot setups even recall Stanley Kubrick’s framing of the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the POV of a penitent, uncomprehending brute approaching something outside human understanding. Weir also shoots close-ups of craggy faces that bulge from out of the rock’s face like trapped souls, an interpretive image that gains deeper meaning when Miranda and two other girls are seized by some strange impulse to recede into the rock and vanish without a trace, driving those who remain into a paranoid frenzy.
At this point, the dominant reference point for the film becomes Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist breakthrough, L’Avventura, which also hinges on an inexplicable disappearance. Antonioni’s film bitterly split audiences, critics, even other filmmakers when it debuted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, but the Italian director managed to consolidate support with 1966’s Blow-Up, which married his high-art exploration of contemporary alienation and existential quagmires with its generic precedent, film noir. Suddenly, the practical, narrative-driven applications for his style became clear, and directors old (Alfred Hitchcock) and young (Francis Ford Coppola) rushed to emulate him.
Picnic reconfigures L’Avventura in a post-Blow-Up world, inverting its distended, inward-facing vision of characters frozen by crises they can neither articulate nor recognize. Weir’s film swiftly morphs into a procedural, albeit one that never makes any advances with its actual mystery and instead uncovers the factors that might have prompted the event. The repression encoded into Appleyard College at the start of the film expands to cover the entire region (amusingly, the state of Victoria), examining the way that that the girls’ disappearance affects not only their peers but their supervisors, as well as the boys and men who orbit the case. Weir establishes male sexual awareness as the girls ride out to Hanging Rock with a pack of boys who chase after their stagecoach like dogs, and their desperate sprint is even scored to the sound of nearby curs yelping.
After the event, men fall to pieces. Cops treat the young women with dehumanizing, clinical speech that masks ingrained sexism as objective investigation, as when one officer reports that a girl who was with Miranda and the others but did not leave with them was unmolested or, in his words, “quite intact.” Meanwhile, two teenage boys who gawked at the students while they lounged around the rock are irreparably changed: Albert (John Jarratt) tries to forget everything, while Michael (Dominic Guard), goes mad and obsesses over figuring out what happened. The second half of the film balances all of these perspectives with formal devices, blunt and uncomplicated for the men, warped and unorthodox for the women. As tensions boil over and the power structure at Appleyard dissolves, the true horror of the film reveals itself not to be the disappearance of several people, but the possibility that life itself is the unsolvable mystery, and that the vanished teenagers threaten the system by escaping the physical and social restrictions of the world.
Picnic at Hanging Rock would be worth commemoration were it a solitary monument to these themes and its aesthetic prowess, but in retrospect its importance is heightened by its status as a skeleton key for Weir’s entire career. Its complex study of repression as an agent of potentially ruinous rupture and a key motivating factor of suspense informs the director’s 1985 Witness, about a hard-living Philadelphia detective who hides out in Amish country and enters into an erotically restrained pas de deux with a widow, as well as Dead Poets Society (1989), which trades a corseted girls’ school for a blazer-and-tie boys’ academy where education is seen as a mechanized process toward success to the point that no one actually learns.
Further, the apocalyptic imagery on grandiose and intimate levels prefigures Weir’s follow-up film, The Last Wave (1977), as well as his arguable masterpiece, Fearless (1993), about a man (Jeff Bridges) who experiences the same metaphysical transcendence that the Appleyard students do but remains on Earth to enjoy his liberation, to the bewilderment and fear of others. On a broader level, Picnic captures the most compelling contradiction of Weir’s work: The director became a commercial filmmaker by loosely adapting not just an arthouse picture but the arthouse picture, positioning him at a nexus between modernist high art and popular entertainment shared by a select few. It’s not odd that the man who made this movie would eventually make the likes of The Truman Show (1998); it’s eerie how logical the connections between the two are.