More reviews

Australian film in the 1970s: the ocker and the quality film

The Moment of Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock marked the "arrival" of Australian film and was crucial to a broadly based and diverse public investment in the feature film. It gave an acceptable public face to Australian cinema that politicians, cultural elites and audiences could unproblematically endorse. It had quality stamped on it. Its box-office figures were good. Unlike its ocker predecessors, it could be unproblematically lauded. As P.P. McGuinness's 1975 National Times (20/10/1975) review of the film put it: 'It will, thank goodness, demonstrate that Australian filmmakers are capable of much more than the coarse vulgar rubbish like Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple.' Picnic relieved anxieties about Australian, cultural capacities in general and filmmakers' capacities in particular. In doing so it vindicated a new cultural purpose for the "feature film" as that arena of audio-visual production which could set itself resolutely against Australian vulgarity, anti-intellectualism, and those for whom the "ocker" seemed to be not just a figure of fun but a point of active identification.

Sunday, October 22, 2000

Unusual Australian film based on the true story of a group of schoolgirls in 1900 who go on a picnic and several of them mysteriously vanish. Searchers and bloodhounds find no trace of the girls. Were they murdered? Did all of them fall down a hole at the same time (if only one or two fell down, surely the others would have gone for help)? Very strange. Languidly paced, with haunting pan flute music by Zamfir, the film builds a lot of suspense and is quite fascinating, but goes nowhere. In the end, the girls are never found, and to this day no one knows what happened. I hate mysteries like that. No wonder I prefer fiction -- it's much less messy than real life.

When a group of schoolgirls from an elite Victorian finishing school embark on a Valentine's day excursion to an unusual outcropping of volcanic rock, four members of the party are drawn towards the summit, where they experience powerful forces of time, nature, and eroticism, and vanish into thin air. This meticulously crafted Australian film displays a remarkable sense of eerie foreboding and lush surrealist sensibility, which have earned it a rabid cult following. yahoo video