Part II Peter Weir's Adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock

Hello, and welcome to lecture three part two on Peter Weir's adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I'm Giselle Baston, and it's delightful to be back. Today, I'm going to focus on the mythical imagery that is captured by Weir through cinematography, through his use of color, use of lighting, the whole kitty caboodle. How does he explore the imagery of the rock and particularly of Edith in the rock? And how does he employ soundtrack in order to give the his film a sense of or a feel of the uncanny?

0:47

He uses pan flutes by Georges Zanfier. I hope I got Zanfier's first name right. And Beethoven's the second movement of Beethoven's fifth piano concerto. Again, I'll look at color palette, and then look at the how do you film time? Because Lindsay's book of Picnic is an exploration of of of how time functions.

1:11

Lindsay was very fascinated by time. She she wouldn't have any clocks in her own house. She never wore a watch. She was convinced that her presence made clocks stop. She was interested in cyclical time.

1:24

She was interested in parallel time, a nonlinear sense of time. And in that sense, she she really sets up quite a challenge for Peter Weir to translate that into what I call film grammar. How do you take that theme and film the theme? So that's what we'll look at today. Through tropes of, sexuality and death and intimacy and through the use of music, lighting, camera angles, and color, as I said, the spectator we, the spectator of the film, we accept the existence of a fluidity of the boundaries between seen and unseen worlds.

2:09

So you'll pay attention to Miranda's words, all that we see and all that we see at the start of the film. Mythical imagery. You recall from my first lecture on Picnic that scholars and critics have read the novel, Lindsay's novel, as being constructed around a number of binary oppositions that mediate on the presence of a settler colonial culture that foregrounds its belonging to the land. The land around Appleyard, College and at Woodend is a land that Lindsay depicts as, I think to an extent, having been exploited, and it's been employed, and it's been expected to yield to, you know, the settlers' concepts of map maps and order and ownership and fences. And the natural world seems to be, and I'm using, Harriet Wilde's words here, seems to be an element to bend.

3:11

Again, from Wilde, early settlers were driven to control the landscape to exert a domination over it that was absent in its previous Aboriginal history. Let's turn to that immovable piece of the landscape called the rock, hanging rock itself. As it says on the quotation on the slide from Gladden, the rock is an intense metaphysical and ultimately or the story is an intense metaphysical and ultimately tragic encounter with nature. The opposition between urban and natural space becomes magnified into an encounter and collision between a European culture, old in tradition but newly arrived, and an ancient and alien landscape and absent indigenous culture, between supposed cultural order and wilderness natural order, and between knowledge, certainty, and the void, mystery. So the rock, ironically, looks solid.

4:06

It really looks present. But the way it's rendered through Lindsay and Weir, the rock becomes an absence. It becomes a mystery. It becomes devoid. It becomes inscrutable.

4:18

And I'm quite sure that's why Weir really profiles how so many of the fascia of the rock resembles a face. One critic refers to it looking like those big statues on Easter Island. It's very medicine, and it makes the human subjects looking from below, looking above from below, it makes them feel small in this this vast landscape, I think. So that perspective and camera angle serves to embellish on the on the themes that Lindsay has presented in the book. In the twentieth century, and of course now in the twenty first century, the secular landscape of Picnic at Hanging Rock possesses a void.

5:00

There's an absence of deity which the rock embodies and reflects. And it's interesting that, the celebration of the picnic is about Saint Valentine. He was an actual saint, but, he's he's seen as a well, he had a very serious life and met an absolutely terrible end by all accounts. But, in the pantheon of of saints within some Christian churches, he's not usually one of the most serious thought of seriously or as important. So in a way, this this this ode to love is it seems so out of place in this deeply present but absent landscape.

5:37

I don't know. It seems like an odd ritual to have brought from the old world to this ancient space that's nonetheless new to the white inhabitants who have come there. Blayden says, the rock is something that's almost impossible to articulate. Its age and immensity is terrifying from a human perspective because it is a reminder of humanity's short and fragile existence between the mountains of time during which they did not exist and the past, which will not exist in the future. You remember the comments of the of of Irma and miss McCraw and a couple of others as as when they first see the the rock as they're approaching from the coach.

6:25

And the coachman describes the rock to the girls, and there's a sense of awe. And for characters like Edith, the awe is is is almost too menacing. It's almost too threatening. It's not wow awe. It's like, oh, I'm feeling a bit weird awe about this this rock.

6:46

Let's have a little bit more take a bit closer look at Edith and the rock. The film emphasizes the horror of the girl's disappearance into the rock, and I mentioned it in an earlier lecture, but the terrified Edith begins to scream and runs back down the hill or the rock. As it says in Lindsay, Edith says, come back, all of you. Don't go up there. Come back.

7:11

Edith felt herself choking and tore at her frilled lace aura. Miranda. To her horror, all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith. Miranda, come back. The orphan silence closed in, and Edith began quite loudly to scream and plunged blindly into the scrub and ran, stumbling towards the plane.

7:33

That's from the first towards the end of the first thirty pages of the novel. Now in the film, this shot, this this scene is shot from above, it's one one of the most iconic scenes from the film. You can see from the the picture on the right of the slide that's up, the middle scene, that is from the top of Edith running down the path. This, again, view it's it's as if she's being looked at from a force from above. Is it the rock?

8:05

Edith is with a pretty steady gaze upon this tiny although Edith is not technically tiny, Edith, on this small figure in the landscape. Bladem suggests that Edith is perhaps presented here as being too attached to the earthly world with its comforts of cake. She's too attached to that to be an appropriate muse for the rock. She is not sufficiently light like the ethereal Miranda or of intellectual weight as our Marion and miss McClure. While Irma has beauty and empathy, ultimately she is defined by her rock and thus seems to be rejected by the rock.

8:44

In Taking Miranda, the epitome of beauty and grace, and Marion and Miss McCraw, the characters attributed with knowledge and intelligence, the rock appears to take the best elements that humanity has to offer. That is from page 32 of the Blade. Article that I've got listed amongst all the all the articles and chapters that I referenced in my lectures appears at the end of the slide test. So I've got use of camera, direction, and perspective. And, of course, I'll be talking in a moment about how this is all combined with the soundtrack that Weir taps into or puts into these things, adds to this idea of the uncanny, of the alien like effect that this space has on the women climbing up it.

9:38

Now one of the things that critics and audiences were most struck by when Wheeze film came out in 1975 was its use of soundtrack. It's, kind of entered into the best soundtracks of all time on movie shows that co colect those sorts of things. It was the soundtrack, as I was just saying, it was particularly noticeable in the scene of Edith running, screaming down the hill. And the way that Weir adds to the suspenseful and eerie quality of the girl's ascent up the rock is certainly a crucial element in the telling of a really powerful story in a picnic. So Annabel Carr does a very excellent, summary of sound effects, and there's a lengthy quote on that slide for you to refer to.

10:29

She says very gently, Weir petitions the viewer's awareness to the presence of an immaterial entity. This entity assumes no perceivable form, yet the guttural roaring of motionless air and mid noon stopping of fob watches charge the unknown issue with the power not only to be, but to interact with the physical world. As Weir confesses, much of the nightmarish semblance of picnic rock scenes is attributable to the oddness of the noises. And this is a quote from Weir himself. With the soundtrack, I used white noise or sounds that were inaudible to the human ear, but were constantly there on the track.

11:03

I've had comments from people saying that there were odd moments during the film when they felt a strange disassociation from time and place. So the use of soundtrack is very much there to exaggerate the sense of disorientation that the characters are feeling. And again, now back to, Annabel Carr. In Picnic, such bizarre noises are an antithetical contrast to the Baroque piano preludes and Zamferian pan flute melodies which accompany the more rational and grounded moments of the film, serving to distinguish through music a very different but definite otherness. So that's interesting the way that the different different types of music used in the film are used to profile aspects of what, again, things are under consideration at the time.

11:53

So there's the the breathy pan flute that accompanies Miranda very often, and it's it's what you can hear at the very opening of the film. And that's contrasted with music from the Australian composer Bruce Neaton and his whirling, almost dervish type music that builds the attention and the suspense as the girls are going up the hill. And it's counterpointed by the inclusion of Beethoven's piano concerto number five, the second movement, particularly in scenes that accompany Miranda, both as she is envisaged by Michael and in slow motion and in scenes where her her memory is present as Michael is recovering and even staring at swans of his uncle's property because the swan is an icon that represents Miranda. And I'll be talking about that in one more detail next time. So, yes, Beethoven's Day for the very European civilized ordered but romantic overtones of those scenes of, you know, English culture superimposed on an alien space.

13:03

That alien space which is connected to noise, is sometimes dissonant and stirring and perhaps stirring in a way that sounds uneasy. Rayner Jonathan Rayner says, in the film, the music simultaneously uplifts and threatens because the viewer listener knows that for some of the girls, their ascent will be perpetual. There will be no descent. No descent back to order. No descent back to to social order.

13:35

And I've got links there on the slide for you to listen to particular examples of those three different types of soundtrack. I think it's Hida Weir used oh, for the roaring sounds, especially around the rock, you hear the sound like there's a wind, a a roaring wind. What we ended up doing was getting recordings of earthquakes and playing them backwards or playing them slow. And it's a really effective device actually because this idea that like an like an earthquake, you can sort of feel really unsteady on the ground. As if I mean, you've ever heard one.

14:15

I've heard two. One in Adelaide, woken up in the middle of the night to what I thought was a train bearing down on my house. It was just like a roar. And another one in Tokyo, which was exactly the same. And, yeah.

14:29

So when to tick I mean, that's what a a real artist can do, think, is think, hey. I want this I want sound to create this response in the viewers and to create and add meaning to the script. And so, oh, what would do it? What would be a really uneasy sound? And so one thing you could obviously think of would be, you know, fingernails across a chalkboard.

14:48

But all of you too remember too young to remember chalkboards. But, yeah, that's that was a really cringey, ghastly sound. But, when it comes to the uncanny, oh, bring something that is a threat, a sound of threat to the human individual. Okay. Let's move on to color palette.

15:05

This film, as I said last time, was informed by the dreamy, you know, time ambiguous reflections of the Australian impressionist painters from the Heidelberg School. And what Weir brings is is real attention to the palette of his or his film palette. So in addition to the soundtrack, Weir includes mythical and arch archetypal references in terms of his film's use of color. The film critic, Dara O'Donoghue, makes the astute observation that the most resonant pattern of images links motifs across time and space with the colour red. So as you can see on the slide, there's the rose seen in the cribbit sequence in the vase of flowers beside Miranda and Sarah's window.

15:55

This becomes the red flower on missus Appleyard's desk as she prepares Sarah for the expulsion that will lead to her murder and dumping in a greenhouse. Sarah's dumped in a greenhouse made up of artificially nurtured blooms. Get it? Yep. A significant thread of this motif ties bright red coats worn by the indigenous tracker who helps the search for the missing women.

16:17

He's only glimpsed in brief shorts, but it also links the soldiers at the colonel's guarding party guarding the governor. And the most famous example and striking example in the film is Irma's red cape that she's wearing when she visits her classmates after her rescue. And this scene, which should be joyful reconciliation between Irma and the other her classmates, actually turns into a scene of hysterical mob violence as they all scream at her. So tell us, Irma. Tell us, Irma.

16:52

Where are they? What happened, Irma? And it just ends in disarray. And that's when you know that life at Apple Yard College is really unraveling. And in this scene too, you'll notice that the pupil's pure white costuming is transformed in the case of those who return returns from the rock, and she's out of her white diaphimous clothing, and she's now dressed in insignificant brown in scenes when she goes with Diane de Gottiers back to the rock to try and retrace her steps before she lost contact with the other girls.

17:30

And it's certainly there, well, when Irma wears this scarlet cape, which is according to Rayna, an adult costume, redolent of an awakened sexuality when she comes to leave the school. So the losing of white and the taking on of red is is established traditional color imagery that we find in literature, historical references in many parts of the world. And it seems to most often be used in English literature, certainly, and art and painting to represent the movement from innocence to experience. And it's also worn by miss McCraw at the picnic scene, you can see her there with her umbrella seated behind that under once the forty years. Now moving into mythic time and picnic, how do you film time?

18:25

Well, obviously, you spend a lot of time filming clocks and stopwatches and all kinds of things. In translating the interplay of mystery, destiny, and co coincidence at work in Lindsay's novel, the film uses a variety of filming techniques, says Rayner. The novel's unpredictable shifts in tense and perspective are expressed through alterations in film speed. Time lapse photography is used in the observation of ants consuming a celebration cake at the picnic grounds. The point of view of the male characters watching the girls crossing the creek on their way up the rock is relayed through eroticized slow motion.

19:03

Miranda gets a lot of slow motion. Yes. All the longer to gaze upon her, thinks Michael. We also used a range of effects on the soundtrack to exaggerate the sense of disorientation. So, yeah, I've already covered that.

19:17

But back to time, in Lindsay's novel, the watches at the picnic party all stop at twelve noon, and the disappearance of the girls shifts to time becoming increasingly fluid. Nevertheless, the final collapse of European timekeeping does not occur in the bush, but interestingly, at Ulyard College. After Irma is rescued from the rock, an impression is given that seasons having passed since the girls first disappeared, And that's that's really focused on by Weir. But missus Apple Yard reflects in the book, it was now nearly a month since the day of the picnic. So, you know, whole seasons haven't come and gone despite the appearance of much more time having passed between the disappearance and Irma's recovery.

20:07

At the college, missus Abelyard forgets to wind her clock, and and that gets mentioned on on pages one hundred and ten and one hundred and sixty seven of the edition of picnic at hanging rock on on freedom. And with her loosening of the grip on time, missus Appleyard loses the grip she maintains on herself. Certainly, missus Appleyard reflects on time when she goes to the rock before she descends to her death, and European linear time no longer seems to be able to contain the girls who have climbed the rock. The girls have passed into myth, becoming both historical and timeless. And on her return, this is expressed by Irma who has become incapable of separating the past from the present.

20:54

This is what it says in Lindsay's book about Irma and time. Down at the lodge, Irma too has heard the clock strike five, only half away from staring out at the garden slowly, taking on color and outline for the coming day. At the hump hanging rock, the first grey light is carving out the slabs and pinnacles of its eastern face. Or perhaps it is sunset. It is the afternoon of the picnic and the four girls are approaching the pool.

21:20

Again, Irma sees the flash of the creek, the wagonette under the blackwood trees, and a fair haired young man sitting on the grass reading a newspaper. So here, time is sort of played out in parallel ways as Irma is through recollection and memory, is getting glimpses of things that have happened. And she tries her brain is has been trained to try and organize time into a sequence that makes sense. But here, rather, it's just a sense of impressions that Irma is recording. So this is how Lindsay gets away from the idea of ordered linear Greenwich time, And it's and and takes it to a place where Lindsay was fascinated herself, as I said at the outset of today, with the idea of cyclical time, parallel time. In today's lecture on Peter Weir's adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Giselle Baston discusses the use of mythical imagery, cinematography, and soundtracks that evoke a sense of the uncanny. She notes that Weir’s choice of music, like Zanfier's pan flutes and Beethoven's compositions, enhances the film's atmosphere and aligns with the themes of time explored in Lindsay's novel. Lindsay’s fascination with nonlinear, cyclical time presents challenges for Weir, who captures the fluidity between seen and unseen realms through film techniques, including color palettes and camera angles. The rock itself represents a profound metaphysical encounter between European settler culture and the ancient landscape, becoming a symbol of both presence and absence. Characters, particularly Edith, experience a menacing awe towards the rock, emphasizing their fragile existence amidst its immensity. Additionally, the film's soundtrack contrasts eerie sounds with more soothing melodies, reinforcing the disorientation of the characters. Weir's cinematographic techniques express alterations in time perception, highlighted by the halted clocks and the disintegration of linear time, especially noted at Appleyard College, where time seems to lose meaning after the girls’ disappearance. Ultimately, the film navigates the complexities of myth, time, and the human experience in an unsettled landscape.

22:04

Is it a time warp? That I'll talk about that next time, but, yep, you gotta listen to let's do the time warp again. Mhmm. Because that is one of the theories about what has happened to the girls on the rock. It's not in Lindsay's book, at least it was.

22:20

Perhaps in the chapter that was taken out that I talked about in one of my earlier lectures, but, it's certainly not in the copy of the book that we are reading.