New Australian Cinema (1980)
Edited by Scott Murray
Material on Picnic at Hanging Rock
Picnic enjoyed the greatest popular and critical success of the three (movies), but it is not a film which grows richer in recollection; occasionally it seems to find visual style an end it itself, and its central enigma (What did happen at Hanging Rock on St. Valentine's Day, 1900?) has to fight for attention with the film's pervasive sense of a smothered sexuality. The parallel suggested between the surface of giggling excited schoolgirls, with its suggestions of real but repressed desire, and the surface beauty of the Australian scene, with its lurking horror, could well have been developed further by Cliff Green in his otherwise capable screenplay. (p.62)
True works of fantasy-perhaps among the richest of films-are open-ended, suspending themselves between possible explanations. Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), for example, ends as it began, in mystery. It is up to the......
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