Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Omg I loved that movie as a kid . Thanks for the reminder !

The first movie I fell asleep during.

It's now a series with Natalie Dormer.

Dormer = almost "dormir," which is Spanish for "sleep."

I love it. Classic. I think it's postcolonial. Others disagree I realise.

The remake sounds pretty fucking stupid so far.

It's a very creepy movie with lots of atmosphere. I think the main thing your'e supposed to come away with is how insignificant humans are. Lots of close ups of insects and the feeling that nature can literally consume you. It's a classic.

At the time, many regarded it as a true story. It isn't. Based on a novel.

I thought the movie was about sexual repression. Sara was obviously in love with Miranda, but of course could only express it by sending her valentines and what not. I don't think either of the males in the film were gay.

It was a strange, effective little movie. It suggested that the young, nubile girls were enticed up to the rock by some kind of sinister, sexual aura. The only girl that gets found is determined to be "intact" but when she shows up at the girl's school before leaving it she's dressed in such a way as to appear she's now become a woman. The girls attack her in a fury, wanting to know what happened to the other girls who disappeared (a staid school teacher is also among the missing). But the girls and the teacher are never found and no one knows what happened to them.

People were clamoring for an answer as to what happened to the girls so the author of the book created a sequel of sorts that explained it. Suffice to say that the explanation was the lamest thing in the world: they got stuck in a time warp! She should have just left well enough alone. To have the girls be gone forever without explanation was eerie and haunting; to resolve the issue by having them get stuck in a time warp was just plain stupid.

"Miranda! Miranda!

The teacher that went missing was played by Vivean Grey, who played Mrs Mangel in the Aussie soap Neighbours back in the day. If I recall rightly her character in the film acts very oddly like she knows somethings going to happen like forboeding. It is strange. Can anyone explain this ?

My roommate at the time was a film major at BU.

If he hadn't taken me to films like this when I was 19 & 20, my taste in movies might not ever have grown past mainstream releases.

The Coolidge Corner Theater in Cambridge had TWO different double features every day,on a loop,with a printed schedule for two months.

We used to bring blackberry schnapps & weed and sometimes sit through all four films!

The basement men's room was also a tearoom so yeah.

Sunday Bloody Sunday & Women In Love was a favorite double feature.

Picnic At Hanging Rock & The Last Wave were also always shown together.

The Man Who Fell To Earth & Repo Man?

The pan pipe music used when they're at the rock is so eerie. The film seems to imply that the girls are somehow seduced by the rocks aura. They get sleepy and she'd garments and appear drawn to an invisible force. It is so strange.

One of my favorite movies.

When it came out, it took forever to persuade people that it wasn't a true story...

Could the girls themselves be supernatural beings? There is that moment when the French teacher says that Miranda is like a Bottecelli angel when she's looking at a picture of Venus. Later when the girls are near the top of the rock they make strange remarks about life 'everything begins and ends at the right time and place' and ' what are those people doing down there like ants. Strange how meaningless human beings lives are. But it's probable they are performing some function unknown to themselves" Does this hint that the girls are awakening to some supernatural self realisation?Does this comment mean perhaps that all of us are in some way asleep to our true identity, and it is only in certain placed like the primordial rock that we 'awaken' to it?

Is it true that it was first offered to Stanley Kubrick, but he turned it down and recommended Peter Weir? Or was that a later Weir film?

40 years ago, my (still current) partner and I had our first date = a picnic at Hanging Rock. This was before all the tourist development, gift shop, ramps for wheelchairs etc. Just the two of us and the wind. Magic. Then we returned to the car to discover all 4 hubcaps were missing. Strange Miranda and the girls took those. We never saw one person there! A brilliant first date, but in 40 years we have never returned.

It's telling that the unprepossessing fat girl gets terrified and starts running away screaming while the other girls languidly continue to climb the rock. It's like the rock is seducing those girls and rejecting the fat one.

1. "Dramatic" Australian movies always have tended to be confused shit piles of angst, bad editing, bad writing, strange performances, and pseudo-intense takes on the human condition that do not resemble anything except a drunken fever dream.

2. Female artistic lunacy is, invariably, nothing worth bothering about. Twat gas.

Congratulations on a happy life, R18. You're the star of this thread!

A nice little touch is when some people are having a picnic by a lake and some lovely violin music is playing on the soundtrack and the camera slowly pans across the scene and then into view comes a string quartet, at the picnic, sitting by the lake and playing the music.

I saw it again a few years ago and the amount of close ups of insects, vegetation etc struck me too R7. It really captures the 'feel' of the Australian bush where in summer it seems like it's crackling and the soundtrack is this ever present sound of cicadas and other insects. Forests can be eerie - in Europe that seems to come from old fairytales and legends whereas in the Australian bush I think it comes from some deep down awareness that we are still somehow aliens in it, even if we aren't Edwardian schoolgirls in long white dresses.

Any more interpretations? I still think miranda is supernatural.

The novel actually continues on after the last scene in the movie .... and it turns out the girls fell into another dimension.... But Weir wanted the ending to be more obscure so he left that out... which was, I think, the right move. Much better this way, so enigmatic and mysterious.

More creepy, in the movie the Rachel Roberts character kills herself by jumping out a window. In real life, Rachael Roberts killed herself by jumping out a window.,

I still have the original novel. The last two pages are an "Extract from a Melbourne newspaper, dated February 12th, 1913." It begins:

"Although Saint Valentine's Day is usually associated with the giving and taking of presents, and affairs of the heart, it is exactly thirteen years since the fatal Saturday when a party of some twenty schoolgirls and two governesses set out from Appleyard College on the Bendigo road for a picnic to Hanging Rock. One of the governesses and three of the girls disappeared during the afternoon. Only one of them was ever seen again. "

It goes on:

"It was thought at the time that the missing persons had attempted to climb the dangerous rock encarpments near the summit, where they presumably met their deaths, but whether by accident, suicide, or straight out murder has never been established, since the bodies were never recovered."

The "article" basically says little, except that the two girls, Edith Horton (the fat one who ran away) and Irma Leopold (the one who was found) were questioned and neither could remember anything or give any useful information as to the whereabouts of the missing. The article concludes by saying: "Thus the College Mystery, like that of the celebrated case of the Mary Celeste, seems likely to remain forever unsolved."

The book says they fell into another dimension?

It did in the original draft -- the publisher took it out. It's in the newest edition of the book, however.

According to her editor Sandra Forbes, Lindsay's original draft of the novel included a final chapter in which the mystery was resolved. At her editor's suggestion, Lindsay removed it prior to publication. Chapter Eighteen, as it is known, was published posthumously as a standalone book in 1987 as The Secret of Hanging Rock by Angus & Robertson Publishing.[citation needed] The chapter opens with Edith fleeing back to the picnic area while Miranda, Irma, and Marion push on. Each girl begins to experience dizziness and feel as if she is "being pulled from the inside out." A woman suddenly appears climbing the rock in her underwear, shouting, "Through!", and then faints. This woman is not referenced by name and is apparently a stranger to the girls, yet the narration suggests she is Miss McCraw. Miranda loosens the woman's corset to help revive her. Afterwards, the girls remove their own corsets and throw them off the cliff. The recovered woman points out that the corsets appear to hover in mid-air as if stuck in time, and that they cast no shadows. She and the girls continue together. They then throw their corsets from the top of the cliff but, instead of falling, the corsets stand still in mid-air. The girls then encounter what is described as "a hole in space", by which they physically enter a crack in the rock; the unnamed woman transforms into a lizard-like creature and disappears into the rock. Marion follows her, then Miranda, but when Irma's turn comes, a balanced boulder (the hanging rock) slowly tilts and blocks the way. The chapter ends with Irma "tearing and beating at the gritty face on the boulder with her bare hands".

The missing material amounts to about 12 pages; the remainder of the publication The Secret at Hanging Rock contains discussion by other authors, including John Taylor and Yvonne Rousseau. The suspension of the corsets and description of the hole in space suggest that the girls have encountered some sort of time warp, which is compatible with Lindsay's fascination with and emphasis on clocks and time in the novel.

A time warp...how lame and unoriginal can you get? It's so much more fascinating to never know what happened to those girls.

This Australian band I used to like was playing a show in Grass Valley and it was being broadcast live and the radio host told them that he'd just seen Picnic at Hanging Rock and asked if Australia was 'like that' and one of the singers responded, "Pretty girls in white flowing dresses disappearing into rocks? Yes. All the time."

Agree R27 -- which is why Weir went for the mysterious ending, not the sic-fi-like one.

There's a nice scene of Dominic Guard climbing up the rock in tight pants.

Love the movie so much. And tbh those girls alwayr act like they have some prior knowledge.....and miss Mcgraw too. What do you guys think?

bumpiest ride

I once met Anne Lambert who plays Miranda and she told me that film has given her more stalkers than anything else she has done. No wonder since Peter Weir presented her in such a beautiful way.

[quote]It really captures the 'feel' of the Australian bush where in summer it seems like it's crackling and the soundtrack is this ever present sound of cicadas and other insects. Forests can be eerie - in Europe that seems to come from old fairytales and legends whereas in the Australian bush I think it comes from some deep down awareness that we are still somehow aliens in it, even if we aren't Edwardian schoolgirls in long white dresses.

Yes! Absolutely. That is such a big theme of the movie - how so many of us Australians are interlopers in a country that is so vast and ancient that we can't possibly understand it. Yet we try and bend it to our will, but it will always be greater than us. The scene at the picnic, all the British there, dressed up in their finest clothes in the middle of a scorching summer's day for example.

What I love about this film is that you could explain it in many different ways that all could make sense. It's not a movie that raises questions because it's badly put together, if you get me. As an Australian, I find so many of the movies and tv shows that purport to show what our country is like miss the point, kinda like the picnickers mentioned above, wanting it to be the way THEY want it to be. This film gets it. The soundtrack of the bush is exactly what it sounds like.

The music is eerie, yet beautiful. In fact so much of this movie's eerieness comes out of beauty rather than the usual way you might expect it. Those rock faces that look almost human, the disorienting camera shots, it all comes together so well.

A few years back I saw the original version, nowadays you mostly get the Director's Cut, which is shorter. But nothing is lost, I don't think, he just cuts out the scenes of Irma and Michael going on dates.

I watched the remake but it was so unnecessary I thought. Though afterwards I read the book and a number of scenes in the remake but not in the first movie were from the book (Miss Lumley and her brother in the fire, for example).

Joan Lindsay was a strange old bird who was psychic and said all clocks and watched stopped around her. Strange things apparently happened on set around Lindsay and the actor whilst at the rock

interesting read

R2 Doctors recommend this film as a safe, non habit forming sleep aid. I didn't fall asleep, I walked out. It's certainly no picnic.

It's a beautiful film. Think I might watch it again tonight.

I miss IMDB message boards. Lots of interpretations about this one.

Anyone have a similar movie to recommend?

I would say Walkabout. Maybe The Beguiled.

Absolutely love it, and I didn't at first. It took repeat viewings, but it grew on me. I subsequently read the novel, which I cannot praise enough. It is beautifully written, and utterly beguiling. Joan Lindsay's command of language in that book is incredible. It might be my favorite book.

But what about Michael?