Picnic at Hanging Rock
Directed by Peter Weir • 1975 • Australia
Starring Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.
-
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Directed by Peter Weir • 1975 • Australia
Starring Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen MorseThis sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lin...
Extras
-
In the Service of Horror—The Lyrical Cinematography of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
Observations on Film Art No. 35
Though its premise is not far removed from that of a straightforward horror movie, Peter Weir’s Australian New Wave classic PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK forgoes conventional shocks in favor of an eerie, otherworldly languor that’s closer to the moody atmospherics of an ...
-
Patton Oswalt on PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
-
Megan Abbott on PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
-
Peter Weir on PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
In this 2003 interview, director Peter Weir discusses the production and enduring mystery of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
-
A Recollection . . . Hanging Rock 1900
This 1975 on-set documentary by PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK executive producer Patricia Lovell features interviews with source novel author Joan Lindsay, director Peter Weir, and cast members Rachel Roberts and Dominic Guard.
-
David Thomson on PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
In the following piece, recorded in 2014, film scholar David Thomson introduces PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
-
Everything Begins and Ends
This documentary, produced in 2014, features interviews with PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK producers Hal and Jim McElroy, executive producer Patricia Lovell, cinematographer Russell Boyd, and actors Helen Morse and Anne Louise Lambert. The interviews were conducted in 2003.
-
Queersighted: Queer Fear
This new conversation between critic and programmer Michael Koresky and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman, discussing the films in Queersighted: Queer Fear, was recorded in 2020.
