A Dream Within A Dream

“Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?” – Edgar Allen Poe

I was pleasantly surprised over Christmas to find out that one of my favourite movies of all time has at long last been given the Special Edition treatment on DVD, albeit only as an Australian release.

Picnic At Hanging Rock is a strange, ethereal movie, and one that many of my friends who I’ve raved about it to over the years have subsequently watched and failed to see what all the fuss is about. A definite Marmite movie, or perhaps that should be Vegemite, given its Australian heritage.

Originally released in 1975, the story revolves around a group of schoolgirls from a very prim and proper boarding school in the Australian outback who go on their annual Valentine’s Day outing in 1900 to Hanging Rock to enjoy the titular picnic. However, while they are they four of the girls wander off to explore the upper slopes of the Rock and three of them (and later a teacher who goes to look for them) disappear without trace.

On the face of it Picnic appears to be a period piece wrapped up in a mystery, but following the source material closely, the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, director Peter Wier breaks with convention by never actually providing a resolution to the question of what happened to the girls.

Far from harming the movie, however, it is this lack of closure that sets Picnic At Hanging Rock apart and ensures that the story lingers in your mind long after the credits have finished rolling.

Author Lindsay was deliberately vague in the opening paragraph of her book as to whether the events were based on fact or were fictional, and it is this ambiguity, that remains largely unanswered to this day, that had caused admirers of the movie to debate this point ever since, and to search for clues within both the film and the original text with which to solve the mystery.

I first saw this movie by accident when it was shown late one night on television, and have been both captivated and haunted by it ever since. Weir evokes a wonderfully dreamy and at times unsettling atmosphere, largely due to his inventive use of slightly slowing down much of the film stock, and allows the story to unfold at a very sedate pace.

Having seen it several times over the years, I am still unsure as to what my thoughts are as to the reasons for the disappearance of the girls, which thanks to the combination of an impressive screenplay by Cliff Green and Weir’s breathtakingly beautiful visuals could feasibly be anything from them having fallen down any one of the many deep holes that lurk within Picnic Rock’s myriad dark and twisting pathways, to extra-terrestrial abduction, and all points in between.

Joan Lindsay did hint in one interview that the story was a mixture of actual events and her imagination, and had no qualms in disclosing that the book almost wrote itself, coming to her in dreams over a period of a few weeks, all of which fuels the speculation that at least part of the tale was drawn from events in her youth. In addition, there is a stone monument located near Picnic Rock that serves as a memorial for three girls that went missing near the rock in the mid 1800’s, and who later turned up murdered, but there is no such closure in either the book or the movie.

Ultimately Picnic At Hanging Rock is a delightful, if slightly unsettling, viewing experience that never fails to captivate me for its two hour running time, and is deservedly considered as one of the movies that firmly put the Australian film business on the map in the 1970s. Still screened each year after twilight on Valentine’s Day at the base of the Rock, this is a movie that lodges itself in the subconscious and remains with the viewer for a long time.

As a final note, I must mention that there was originally a final chapter to the book explaining what supposedly happened, and which Lindsay wisely removed from the finished manuscript. While an interesting theory (which I won’t reveal here), in my eyes it actually serves to destroy much of the power of the book that stems from the unresolved mystery. I prefer to ignore this explanation and instead revel in the eternal mystery that the film presents.