Picnic at Hanging Rock -- Garbo
In 1979, I'd been living in a college town for three years and thus had access to foreign films and art movies. I can't remember now where I saw "Picnic at Hanging Rock," though. I don't think it was at the Von Lee, and I don't recall it being part of the Ryder magazine film series. I kind of remember seeing it at a mall movie theater, but had they even built the mall on the east side already?
It doesn't help that I might have "Picnic at Hanging Rock" conflated with Peter Weir's previous film, the one about a tidal wave and climate change and dreams of the future. . . [Pardon me while I go use Google. Oh, right, here it is. Thank you, internet.]
"The Last Wave," which I enjoyed but which confused me -- wherever I saw it -- was good preparation two years later for "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which was also good/confusing.
The blurriness of plot isn't all Weir's doing. Some of the hard-to-understand parts were because Picnic at Hanging Rock, the novel by Joan Lindsay, was intriguing but intentionally baffling.
The Australian author, interestingly, didn't originally intend the book to be as mystifying as it was. Cheshire Publishing talked Lindsay into clipping off the last chapter so readers would be left -- well -- hanging. The book first came out in Australia in 1967, and then Penguin put out an American edition in 1975.
The excised section of the novel, quite confusing and mystifying in itself, contains the kind of imagery which sticks in the brain even as it creates more questions than it answers.
This brief final chapter was too short to stand alone as a separate publication. Three years after Joan Lindsay's death, the excised chapter was bundled with commentary from other writers on the meaning of original book, and came out in paperback as The Secret of Hanging Rock.
In 1980, between the first Penguin edition and the Secrets follow-up, and during Lindsay's lifetime, another volume of speculation and criticism about the book was published: The Murders at Hanging Rock.
The unexplanable nature of the original novel must have attracted Peter Weir. Probably didn't hurt anything that Joan Lindsay's inspiration for the events within the plotline came from an otherworldly source. The Wikipedia entry for the book says
The story doesn't end in 1987. An updated TV version of Picnic at Hanging Rock showed up on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago. I haven't checked this version out yet, but I like the idea that a new generation of viewers have had the chance to argue about what "Picnic at Hanging Rock" means.
It doesn't help that I might have "Picnic at Hanging Rock" conflated with Peter Weir's previous film, the one about a tidal wave and climate change and dreams of the future. . . [Pardon me while I go use Google. Oh, right, here it is. Thank you, internet.]
"The Last Wave," which I enjoyed but which confused me -- wherever I saw it -- was good preparation two years later for "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which was also good/confusing.
The blurriness of plot isn't all Weir's doing. Some of the hard-to-understand parts were because Picnic at Hanging Rock, the novel by Joan Lindsay, was intriguing but intentionally baffling.
The Australian author, interestingly, didn't originally intend the book to be as mystifying as it was. Cheshire Publishing talked Lindsay into clipping off the last chapter so readers would be left -- well -- hanging. The book first came out in Australia in 1967, and then Penguin put out an American edition in 1975.
The excised section of the novel, quite confusing and mystifying in itself, contains the kind of imagery which sticks in the brain even as it creates more questions than it answers.
This brief final chapter was too short to stand alone as a separate publication. Three years after Joan Lindsay's death, the excised chapter was bundled with commentary from other writers on the meaning of original book, and came out in paperback as The Secret of Hanging Rock.
In 1980, between the first Penguin edition and the Secrets follow-up, and during Lindsay's lifetime, another volume of speculation and criticism about the book was published: The Murders at Hanging Rock.
The unexplanable nature of the original novel must have attracted Peter Weir. Probably didn't hurt anything that Joan Lindsay's inspiration for the events within the plotline came from an otherworldly source. The Wikipedia entry for the book says
The story doesn't end in 1987. An updated TV version of Picnic at Hanging Rock showed up on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago. I haven't checked this version out yet, but I like the idea that a new generation of viewers have had the chance to argue about what "Picnic at Hanging Rock" means.
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| Garbo |
I remember being really freaked out about this as a kid...thanks for the link - must check it out & see if it was as creepy as I remember!
ReplyDeleteI saw the Weir films and cannot remember my conclusions... I'd like to check them out again and revisit my thoughts.
ReplyDelete