Notes on Picnic at Hanging Rock

The 1975 film Box is celebrated for its beautiful cinematography by Russell Boyd and direction by Peter Weir, reflecting Australia’s excitement about modernity and independence. Despite being set in the past and containing disturbing themes, it resonates with the audience's fascination with the Australian landscape. The discussion will focus on the film’s development, reception, and its interpretation of the landscape based on Joan Lindsay's work. It explores the film's mise en scène and cinematography, influenced by the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionist painters and British photographer David Hamilton. Additionally, the lecture will address the film's references to art and its connection to the "lost child" trope, significant in Australian culture.

0:00

Box from 1975. I absolutely love this film. I know it's considered quite conservative by many just young boys of film, Australian film in particular. But I don't know. It just came out at a time that Australia was feeling excited about its sense of modernity and independence.

0:30

And even though this story is set in the past and has, you know, many disturbing features as a story, I think it just tapped into people's fascination with the Australian landscape. And it was filmed so beautifully by cinematographer Russell Boyd and directed so so so very well by Peter Weir That's it it continues to be one of Australia's most successful and certainly best known films. So this is what I'm going to be looking at today. The how Weir's film was came about, who thought to do it, and how was it received. And I'll look at how it films the Australian landscape and interprets Lindsay's reference to the landscape in her book through the medium of film.

1:32

And I'll talk about the films mise en scene and cinematography that was strongly influenced by the work of the Heidelberg School of Australian impressionist painters who were active in Victoria in the eighteen eighties and nineties, and how the film too is, informed by the photography of the twentieth century British photographer, David Hamilton. By the way, I do give you a definition of mise en scene on a slide in just a moment, so don't worry if you're unfamiliar with the term. And I'll close with having a look at how the film uses its references to paintings to contribute to what is sometimes called the white settler trope of the lost child. That is one of those stories that has a particular resonance in Australian popular culture and historically. So I'll explore what all that means.

2:41

So the novel was published in '67 1967. And four years after that, the person who went on to become the film's producer, Patricia Lovell, she read the book that she just picked up, you know, outside a bookshop that was, I think, going out on social, and she thought it would make a really great film. She did not originally think of producing it herself, but her friend talked her into it. And she then optioned the film rights in 1973, and she was able to pay $100 for three months of those film rights. She hired director Peter Weir to direct the film on the basis of a couple of films he had made that were on the the art circuit.

3:33

Peter Weir was by no means very well known at this time. Pat Lovell then went on to hire TV writer, Cliff Green, to do the screenplay. And, Cliff Green pretty much just did one screenplay and Joan Lindsay read it and absolutely loved it. So it got the green light from the get go. The finalized budget was absolutely minuscule by today's film standards and costs.

4:12

It was the final budget was $440,000, and the money came from the Australian Film Development Corporation, the British Empire Films, and from the South Australian Film Corporation, and $3,000 came from private investors. Filming took place, in Martindale Hall, which serves as Appleyard College, and Martindale Hall is located near Mentaro in South Australia. Filming began in February 1975, with the principal photography taking six weeks, so it was done cheaply and quickly. Other locations included Hanging Rock in Victoria and at a studio of the South Australian Film Corporation in Adelaide. Because of this money from the South Australian Film Corporation, SA Film Corp was able to insist that Peter Weir used the South Australian location in some way in his film in order to promote tourism in South Australia.

5:31

And hence, the use of Martindale Hall and many of the supporting cast of schoolgirls were sourced, as it were, from posh ladies colleges from around Adelaide, such as Seymour College and Wilderness. The principal actors are, of course, all professional actors. So, yeah, these are just the, you know, the girls you see scattered around in the background. The film premiered in August 1975 at the Hindley Cinema Complex in Adelaide. It was well received by audiences and critics alike.

6:12

And by 1978, it had made more than 3,000,000 in Australian cinemas, and it eventually grossed 5,000,000, more than 5,000,000, in box office sales in Australia alone. Now this is equivalent to about 41,000,000 by today's box office takings. Now Joan Lingard's film has always long been highly regarded by many, but it wasn't a massive success when it was released in 1967. But after the release of the film adaptation, the the the book absolutely gained in popularity. The film is a very faithful adaptation of Joan Lindsay's story, But it's not a mere replica, because at the same time, it certainly as the Jonathan Rayner, a film critic, has said, it certainly manages to be both a faithful adaptation and a distinctive cinematic experience.

7:27

So how does we film the Australian bush? You'll remember how in an earlier lecture on picnic, I mentioned that the central events of picnic take place in the Victorian bush, and in both book and film, there are many references to the landscape. Joan Lindsay, as we've seen, gives intricate details of the rock formation and the natural life that exists in the bush, the insects, the animals, the trees, the shrubs, and so forth, and the fauna. In the film adaptation, the scenes at the rock also linger. The cinematography also lingers on these natural features and finds, in the words of Victoria Bladen, it finds a flossom of what?

8:23

Anyway, Caesar analogous to, the descriptions that are found in Joan Lindsay. Certainly, the film picks up the age, the mystery, the hostility, and unaccommodating quality and alien of the Australian landscape. Two film, scholars, Glendo Vak and Miles Breen, have observed that, quote, Weir interjects into his microcosm of the Australian bush a plethora of detail, much of which has very little to do with the dramatic structure of his film. So this shows that Peter Weir as a director very much has a visual cinema vision of what he wants in his film. He's not just filming a story or a plot.

9:10

He is filming a cinematic world like so many directors do, of course. But Peter Weir is his films are noted for the absolute quality of their of their color, their use of shade, and so forth. And, of course, this is achieved through the use of the cinematographer, Russell Boyd, who, went on also to become a very, very famous, film cinematographer. Now the film's look, you know, the whole use of its color palette, its use of lighting, and the framing of mise en scene is set up to look very it's very much informed rather by the work of the Heidelberg School of Artists. And you can see on the slides that I've just put up that there's a definition there of mise en scene, which is everything that appears before the camera and its arrangements, so the composition, the sets, the props, the actors, costumes, lighting, color, etcetera.

10:22

So both those screenshots are from his film. But I think we could all say that they could pass as a stand alone painting. So who the who were the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionists? Well, they're a group of painters who were active in Victoria in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. And leading Heidelberg School member, Frederick McCubbin, also lived in and often painted the Macedon Ranges, which is the setting and filming location of Picnic.

11:04

To achieve the look of an impressionist painting for the film, director Weir and director of cine matography, Russell Boyd, were inspired by the work of British photographer and film director, David Hamilton, who had draped different types of veils over his camera lens to produce diffused and soft focus images. We'll see an image from Hamilton and the Seven. But for this film, Boyd, the cinematographer, created the ethereal dreamy look of many scenes by placing simple bridal fabric of various thicknesses over his camera lens. So on the left is a frame from the film by Weir, and on the right is a photograph by David Hamilton. David Hamilton, I don't think, would have enjoyed the same success in the twenty twenties as he did in the nineteen seventies.

12:07

His style of pretty much only photographing very young women on the cusp of womanhood, I'm trying to put this politely, would obviously come into, I think, lot more scrutiny and so forth now. But in in nineteen seventies, Hamilton was considered artistic and chic. But certainly, you can see the familiarity the similarities between Weir and Hamilton there. Now in addition to the Heidelberg School of Painters, and I will get back to the Heidelberg School of Painters in a bit, but this is another painting that, didn't so much inform Peter Weir as it did inform Joan Lindsay. What you can see there is a painting.

13:07

I'll talk a little bit about it in a minute, but it was exhibited in the National Gallery of Victoria, which was under the directorship of Joan Lucey's husband. And, one of the one of the Heidelberg Painters, not this William Ford one, but one of the Heidelberg Painters, Frederick McCubbin, one of his pupils at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1916 was a young woman named Jonah Beckett Viegel, and she was later to become Joan Lindsay. So there's connection which is really quite interesting. Joan Lindsay studied painting under Frederick McCubbin of the Heidelberg School, and Peter Weir in his film references the paintings by the Heidelberg Artists over and over and over again in so many of his scenes in Picnic. So you've got art referencing art referencing art in that instance.

14:15

The book references the painting that Lindsay knew, and Peter Weir references Lindsay, and, of course, employs the painting he lends to his own his own artwork. Now exhibited at the Victoria Gallery was this painting that you can see on this slide now. It's by William Ford, and it's called At the Hanging Rock. And it was produced in 1875, and it depicts a group of scattered figures in pale attire enjoying a leisurely excursion. Now Lindsay would almost certainly have been aware of this painting because of her husband's connection to the gallery, and, in addition, she knew the Macedon District from her childhood, as I've as I've said previously.

15:12

No. Sorry. I'll go back to Ford. According to the scholar, Marguerite Johnson, this Ford painting depicts a decidedly colonial interpretation of the Australian landscape, including signs that the London born Ford struggled to bond with the Australian bush, which he rendered in varying shades of khaki. The the whole idea of the color eucalyptus didn't exist yet in paint.

15:40

The attempt to understand, indeed, to tame the landscape is evident in Ford's decision to populate it with civilized picnikers. Of course, this fails, thinks Johnson. The only female cast appears out of place in their frocks and hats. There is, however, one noticeable picnicker, a young woman who brings the pretty much only splash of color to the dreary scene. She stands left of center with her back towards the viewer, adorned in a blue coat and matching blue hair ribbon.

16:15

This figure, according to Johnson, is a likely prototype of Miranda. And Miranda, in Joan Lindsay's book, alludes to this painting as she traverses the path to the rock. And there you can see a very important quotation. It's Miranda saying, I remember my father showing me a picture of people in old fashioned dresses having a picnic at the rock. Wish I knew where it was painted.

16:46

So references within references within references. In addition to this painting by Ford, the Heidelberg the the Heidelberg. Let's get back to them and explore them in some more detail. You have a description on that side of who the other painters were in this particular painting group, painters such as Arthur Streaton, Walter Withers, Charles Conder, Tom Roberts, and, of course, Frederick McCubbin. The film is as much in love with Lindsay's story as it is with the paint, Heidelberg School of Painters.

17:36

According to film historian Grant Turner, Weir's film references the works of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streatham, and you can see it in the way he's inspired for the dissolving views of the bush and the rock seen during the credit sequence. At a more fundamental level, the film's concentration on the passing of freezing of time bears a strong resemblance to the conceptual notions that underpinned the Heidelberg Impressionist's works. Lindsay's character's frequent comments on mortality and time within the story accord with the Heidelberg Artist's attempts to capture a personal experience or interpretation of the landscape. In the film, the girls head out to the Hanging Rock, and as they begin the picnic and the climb, the film starts to slowly turn to a more abstract dreamy quality, and the atmosphere of mystery starts to creep in. From the strange conversations in the the Horse Roach about time to the lush scenes of the girls picnicking at the foot of the landmark, there's a lot of slow crossfades and shots that are out of more that are of a, sorry, more painterly quality, certainly often invoking the Heidelberg Artists.

19:18

You can see from the pictures on the slide, you've got on top left, there is a McCubbin painting of a picnic. There is a Tom Roberts painting on the second from left. And then you've got at the top two screenshots from Weir's film. And the bottom right screenshot is of a scene taking place at Michael Fitzhughart's uncle's estate. It's simply beautiful.

19:56

I mean, there's some parts of this film are just you can just watch them and watch them. Now the other apart from, there's another connection between painters like McCubbin and one of the themes of Joan Lindsay's novel that is is that Weir makes the most of in his film adaptation, and that is the idea of the white settler trope known as the lost child trope. And what is this? Well, certainly, in Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lindsay plays with the ideas of European vulnerability in the Australian bush, and this underlying tension is achieved with ease in the novel and film because of our our familiarity with the motif of the lost white woman or child. And I'm quoting now from, Marguerite Johnson again.

21:07

He says, there were, of course, real life occurrences which reinforced lost white child trope, and she quotes Australian academic Peter Pearce, who recalls the loss and recover of Clara Crosby, a young girl who went missing in the bush around 1885, and hers was a story that that had enormous coverage in the newspapers, in the press. It inspired paintings of the period, most noticeably one that you can see here on the screen by Frederick McCubbin. Most famous thing is painting of a girl collecting mistletoe in a thicket of towering eucalypts where just a small patch of sky is visible is called. The lost child actually, but it's often just referred to as lost. As you can see, he did another one of a boy seated warily on the ground, facing away from the foreground with one hand across his eyes, as if crying.

22:14

So they interchangeably just get known as the lost child or lost, these paintings. Now the coven owned a cottage close to the bush at Mount Massadon, and this was reputedly the setting for the nineteen o seven work. Peter Pearce has said that these visual cliches would provide the material by which so many urban Australians in the next century would comprehend the Australian bush. Now I think when it comes to the the lost child trope, it would that that would be a good point of discussion for our tutorials for on campus students and in the online discussion forums, if you think to to bring it up, because I'd be interested to hear how familiar you are with this particular cultural trope, of Australia. The idea of, mainly white settlers going missing inside the bush, the outback, the desert, and so on.

23:25

It is it's still a very resonant storyline for us in Australia. You can think of the disappearance of the Zaria Chamberlain at what is now called Uluru in the nineteen eighties, or indeed the tragic story of the three children going missing at Lonelle Beach in Adelaide, the children known as the Bromaw children in the nineteen sixties, and many, many, unfortunately, many, many, too many other stories of that kind. It strikes us to the core, our fear, and perhaps our unease as, if you like, new arrivals to this ancient land. Now in my next lecture, I will explore further how Peter Weir employs his film imagery in his depiction of the mythic elements of picnic. I'll be looking more at his cinematography, at his lighting, and the choice of casting.

24:34

So many things that he does to, oh, take Joan Lindsay and tell her in in a stick to her story, but show us whole new things about her story. So be good to talk to you next time. Bye.