Screening times:
Thursday, November 20, 6:30 PM
Peter Weir | Australia | 1975 | 107m
This screening is a co-presentation of Carbon Arc Cinema and Deep Cuts. Deep Cuts is a celebration of the obscure, under appreciated, and underseen. Things we love: late 70s, early 90s, mid 2000s, camp, arthouse, vampires, women's right & wrongs, coming of age, non-horror horror movies, 15-20% on rotten tomatoes, not taking serious films seriously, taking silly films seriously, CanCon, bright colours, practical effects, and bad wigs. @watchdeepcuts
Peter Weir's 1975 classic film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, is a mystery that remains shrouded. In 1900, three schoolgirls and a teacher disappear on a visit to a dormant volcano in the outback of Australia. Picnic At Hanging Rock lets their fate remain deliberately ambiguous while the desperate not knowing haunts the community left behind looking for answers.
As novelist Megan Abbott explains in her Criterion Collection essay about the film, "It is almost impossible to encounter Picnic without always already knowing about its supposed nonending, which, for many, may remove the possibility of frustration. That frustration, however—the unsettling, provocative sense of hidden truths withheld from us—is integral to the film itself, and one of its greatest powers.
"From its beginning, Picnic is about watching, looking, about the gaze itself. The film opens with shots of the schoolgirls all peeping at one another, through mirrors, doorways, and we—through the camera’s voyeuristic intrusion into the girls’ toilettes, their private worlds—are peeping at them. But one feels, too, from the opening shots of the landscape, a larger sense of someone else watching, Hanging Rock itself watching. A godlike gaze from above. The characters gaze up at it, but we also feel it gazing down at them, at us."
Perhaps the lack of resolution to the mystery is why Picnic At Hanging Rock continues to exert an influence on filmmakers and creatives. It's easy to see the effect it's had on David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, Damon Lindelof, and Ari Aster. And what it's done to us in the audience, still talking about it 50 years later.
"The “readings” are endless, the mood impossibly eerie and the legacy untouchable." - Kevin Maher, The Times (UK)
"The various layers of feeling from ethereal coming-of-age fantasy, to domestic drama, to supernatural mystery to surreal nightmare turn Weir’s film into a beguiling experience that defies genre." - Soham Gadre, Film Inquiry
"It’s a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria: the bizarre and unclassifiable story of three demure and porcelain-white schoolgirls and one teacher who on Valentine’s Day 1900... simply vanish in the burning sun." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)
Tickets $12.65 ($12 cash at the door if available)
As this is a Deep Cuts event we are unable to process punch pass admissions, apologies
