Film Number 14 on PinHeadLarry145's 30 Days 30 Countries Film Challenge!

Australia, 1975.

I've had this one on my radar for a loooong ass time. The plot was always interesting to me (schoolgirls go missing at a mysterious natural location) but the combination of it being hard to find and my crippling laziness always came in tween me and the film

I finally watched Picnic at Hanging Rock tonight and while it wasn't everything I hoped it would be as a whole, it still turned out to be as mysterious as I expected.

The plot, like I mentioned above, centers around a group of young women from the Appleyard College who take a much anticipated field trip to a natural…

Read any review for Peter Weir’s mesmerising masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and you will see the words haunting, dream-like and enigmatic appear time and again. They are vague and uncertain descriptions but perfectly apt for a film that is elusive, ambiguous and rich in symbolism, complexity and interpretation. I have watched the film numerous times over the years (this, my first viewing in high-definition) and every time I am surprised by the new things I find, the new interpretations I dream up and the mixed emotions the film manages to evoke.

On Valentine’s Day in 1900, a school trip to Victoria’s Hanging Rock turns to disaster when three students and their teacher disappear without trace. Whilst sounding like the…

This is a fascinating film without a doubt. Wherever you stand. Peter Weir has created something mystical, something other worldly, something that I am still trying to throttle my brain out on all cylinders desperately trying to comprehend. It encompasses a cosy feel and aesthetic only to suckerpunch you with mystery and hypnotism, slap you with the eerie and the macabre. It's a slow pace, that never feels slow? A flow. Glide. Slither. Shots like portraits and a movement like sludge. Enticing filmmaking at its finest coupled with its opaque nature. This is not a film to be easily digested and just witnessed for one time only. I already feel a need to revisit, to correlate, I feel that I…

I've been meaning to (re)watch Picnic At Hanging Rock for some time. I had last watched it at some stage in my very early teens so I knew it needed a proper viewing. This year, with my undertaking to watch as much Ozploitation and Aussie New Wave as possible, seemed the right time to do so, and with compiling a list of Folk Horror yesterday evening - a category this film could ostensibly fit into - it felt right to watch it now. Also of course the film is set on St Valentine's Day, 1900, and this being 16th Feb, there really was no time like the present.

I must take the time to admit that whilst I am on…

Part of the No Rewatch November 2012 Project.

What could have been just another story about missing girls turned out to be something quite different. The shift comes when you realize that it isn't really a story about missing girls at all. The disappearance of the girls is just a catalyst for the real story which is what happens to a community when a group of young girls and their teacher disappear on a routine picnic. The reaction of the community is really the thing here. To have them gone is one kind of horror, but the endless open question is another item altogether. That not-knowing is it's own kind of torture is exactly the point. When you add to…

52/100

Enigmatic to a fault. I'm (still) okay with the disappearance remaining unexplained, and was ready (again) to roll with the entire film as a vague metaphor for sexual awakening, what with Hanging Rock's many phallic peaks and vaginal crevices. But there are too many really specific unanswered questions that diffuse the mystery rather than deepen it. Why include the elderly teacher along with the three young girls? What's with the repeated suggestion (beginning before they even set out for the picnic) that Miranda knows something is about to happen? How do Sara's predicament and its sad resolution correlate with her having been forced to remain behind at the school? And why bother having one of the girls found alive…

Film Number 14 on PinHeadLarry145's 30 Days 30 Countries Film Challenge!

Australia, 1975.

I've had this one on my radar for a loooong ass time. The plot was always interesting to me (schoolgirls go missing at a mysterious natural location) but the combination of it being hard to find and my crippling laziness always came in tween me and the film

I finally watched Picnic at Hanging Rock tonight and while it wasn't everything I hoped it would be as a whole, it still turned out to be as mysterious as I expected.

The plot, like I mentioned above, centers around a group of young women from the Appleyard College who take a much anticipated field trip to a natural…

This is a fascinating film without a doubt. Wherever you stand. Peter Weir has created something mystical, something other worldly, something that I am still trying to throttle my brain out on all cylinders desperately trying to comprehend. It encompasses a cosy feel and aesthetic only to suckerpunch you with mystery and hypnotism, slap you with the eerie and the macabre. It's a slow pace, that never feels slow? A flow. Glide. Slither. Shots like portraits and a movement like sludge. Enticing filmmaking at its finest coupled with its opaque nature. This is not a film to be easily digested and just witnessed for one time only. I already feel a need to revisit, to correlate, I feel that I…

I have just read Days of Heaven described as "the most beautiful film ever made". My reaction to "Picnic..." was that I was watching a film that out-Malicked Malick, that came a few years earlier than DoH, outdid that beautiful film, and that looked as if it had been made in the 2010s. In fact, the last film I saw that was this visually stunning was Melancholia. On that basis it makes it an essential film to see.

Peter Weir may have been driven towards such a visually-propelled approach by the inconclusive mystery surrounding the story he was recounting. He may have turned up to film at Hanging Rock, and been overcome by the power of the landscape, in a…