Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection
by Peter Weir
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DVD details
Actor: Anne-Louise Lambert, Helen Morse, Kirsty Child, Rachel Roberts, Vivean GrayDirector: Peter Weir
Brand: WEIR,PETER
Cinematographer: Russell Boyd
Producer: A. John Graves
Producer: Hal McElroy
Producer: Jim McElroy
Producer: Patricia Lovell
Writer: Cliff Green
Writer: Joan Lindsay
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: Letterbox, 1.66:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1998-11-03
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection
DVD Review: Lovely
Summary: 5 Stars
I agree that the director should have left well enough alone and not bothered with a "Director's Cut." Still, this is a film I love and always have since first viewing it back in the late 1970's. Though not a work that will appeal to everyone, yet for those it does they will find it magical, the stuff that movie cults are made of. DVD Review: A little too vague for me
Summary: 3 Stars
I was so excited to see this film because all the reviews had me tantalized. I do like the film, but I had two problems with it:
1) It was boring at parts. I started to fall asleep in the middle of the film! I managed to stay awake, but it was not easy. Maybe the dreamy ethereal quality worked too well with me. Or maybe I fell under the spell of Hanging Rock!?!?! But seriously, it was difficult to sit through all at one time.
2) It was a little too ambiguous for my taste. Maybe it is the difference of time: a film about 1900 Victorian Australian society made in 1975 and now being viewed in 2009, maybe some things no longer translate well. Or maybe the translation is completely off from what Weir intended because so much has happened since. I was confused. Did everyone have a crush on someone? Is all this sexual repression truly linked to the story, or am I making too big a deal about this? Maybe it's as simple as society makes you sick or vicious, while nature/freedom can set you free. Or maybe this film is just too smart for me, just I will gladly concede.
Haunting, romantic, boring, confounding, suspenseful, ambiguous, and incredibly eerie ... see Picnic at Hanging Rock for yourself to decide. I recommend it, but just be prepared to be amazed and a little irritated at the lack of ending (or because you missed it because you fell asleep).
DVD Review: It's like a dream
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw this film the first time in the eighties and was impressed.
Having it seen again after many years I love the dreamy quality of the story and its interpretation. As a writer it inspired me very much.
DVD Review: Artistic but boring!
Summary: 1 Stars
I saw this film when it first came out. It was such a boring farce. I kept watching the film in the hope that it would make sense, but it never did. Don't waste your money.DVD Review: My Favorite Scary Movie of All-Time
Summary: 5 Stars
I adore scary movies! As a writer, I don't think I can afford to shut myself off from any human emotion, including horror. I love the first HALLOWEEN. I love the first NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT scared the bejeebers out of me and hey, I even enjoyed SAW! Instead of slasher pics, my true favorites are psychological thrillers like THE OTHERS and THE INNOCENTS. Which may be why I think PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is the scariest movie ever made.
This 1975 Australian film from Peter Weir (who would later go on to make GALLIPOLI, WITNESS, DEAD POET'S SOCIETY and MASTER AND COMMANDER) is a lyrical, brooding masterpiece set at Appleyard College (an all-girls school) in 1900. When a group from the college sets out to celebrate Valentine's Day with a picnic jaunt to Hanging Rock--an ancient volcanic outcropping in Victoria--disaster ensues. While the other students are napping, four of the girls defy their teacher's instructions and set off to explore the interior of the rock. The next thing we know, one teacher and three of the girls have vanished into thin air.
Only one girl is found--hysterical and with no memory of what happened to the others. The disappearances send shockwaves of fear and suspicion through the community. The movie's cinematography is exquisite and Weir captured the dreamy quality of the film by actually filming parts of it through a bridal veil. Although the students drift about in white dresses plainly chosen to symbolize their purity, the movie is rife with repressed sexuality. In their darkest hearts, the girls seem to have more in common with the chaotic wildness of the Australian outback than the rigid propriety of their society, which makes it easier to believe that they may have gone willingly to their mysterious fate. Without shedding a single drop of blood, this movie continues to haunt me years after I first saw it.
Description of Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection
Twenty years after it swept Australia into the international film spotlight, Peter Weir's stunning 1975 masterpiece remains as ineffable as the unanswerable mystery at its core. A Valentine's Day picnic at an ancient volcanic outcropping turns to disaster for the residents of Mrs. Appleyard's school when a few young girls inexplicably vanish on Hanging Rock. A lyrical, meditative film charged with suppressed longings, Picnic at Hanging Rock is at long last available in a pristine widescreen director's cut with a newly-minted Dolby? digital 5.1 channel soundtrack.Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, director Peter Weir's lyrical, enigmatic masterpiece is an imaginative tease. The setting is a proper turn-of-the century Australian boarding school for girls, a suffocating institution built on strict moral codes, repressed sexuality, and a subtle but enforced class structure. As the film opens, girls draped in immaculate white dress prepare for a picnic at the nearby volcanic formation, Hanging Rock, and Weir hangs an air of dark foreboding over the proceeding. "You'll have to love someone else, because I won't be here very long," says one virginal girl, Miranda, to her friend. Her words are prophetic: during the picnic, Miranda, along with two other girls and an uptight schoolmistress, vanish into the rocks. While a search party repeatedly returns to the rock to look for either the girls or the reasons for their disappearance, Weir leaves the mystery unsolved. Like Antonioni's L'Avventura, the vanishing is open to numerous interpretations--both rational and illusory--but Weir drops enough allegorical clues that it feels like a parable. He transforms the landscape and weather into menacing and eerie images; outlines of faces can be seen in the rocks, while the oppressive heat beating down on the picnic doubles as an atmospheric metaphor for the girls' unbearable social and sexual confinement. These images and other plot twists toward the end hint that this mysterious vanishing, on some level, was actually a form of spiritual escape--the only out, other than death, from the film's bleak, tightly structured community. Regardless of how you see it, though, this hypnotic puzzle remains the highlight of the '70s Australian New Wave. The DVD version presents the film in letterbox form. --Dave McCoy
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