When in 1975 appeared on the screens Picnic at Hanging Rock , no one could imagine having to front of a movie epic, which, while Peter Weir devoted to audiences throughout the world, launched the second Australian film that had no market outside national borders.
was a time when the unresolved contradiction of humanity, the wilderness and kultur , crossed the territory of Australia, with the director in search of a cinema 'physical' a bit to Werner Herzog, but in which the wilderness played a decisive role.
very accurately using the novel by Joan Lindsay (Picnic at Hanging Rock , 1967; Sellerio, 2000), Weir and screenwriter Cliff Green rewrite history Valentine's Day of 1900, a group of girls from a college in Australia, direct dall'insopportabile Miss Appleyard (Rachel Roberts in the movie), go on a trip visiting all'Hanging Rock, a strange and demonic complex eruption in the area.
Of the four girls have drawn away for a trip on the whole, Miranda (Ann Lambert), Leopold Irma (Karen Robson) and Quade Marion (Jane Vallis) disappear, the only Horton Edith (Christine Schuler) is back, crossing one of the escorts , the math teacher, spinster and unfriendly, Greta McCraw (Vivian Gray), which in turn disappears. The survivors, led by teacher Diane de Poitiers, return to college and this opens the search for girls who will contribute Fitzhubert Michael (Dominic Guard), an English lad on holiday by his uncles who, after having glimpsed by chance at a ford Miranda can not forget her, and the groom Crundall Albert (John Jarrett). Michael will be just to find Irma, and be saved by Albert, while leaving the mystery of what happened at Hanging Rock, as Irma did not remember anything of what happened.
In this plot, enigmatic and completely without resolution (the final chapter of the novel, and deleted from the final version published in 1987 under the title The Secret of Hanging Rock , does nothing to clarify the 'Obviously, that is missing on another dimensional space girls), the writer Joan Lindsay tied a series supporting cast of characters and stories that gave less space and more complexity: people somehow come to join in the plan that you go zooming (op. cit. p.. 166) with less regard to creatures - spiders, mice, cockroaches - which, as a rush, in hidden dens, to Leak terrorized, are comparable to the first, albeit on a smaller scale (ibid.), it is sufficient for all the story of Sara (Margaret Nelson), the orphan girl and the victim's favorite Appleyard, sister of Albert, who committed suicide without having recognized the brother or be recognized by him, following a mechanism very popular in Victorian literature (so typical of the period in which the novel itself is located), that of non-recognitions between brothers.
Point weakness of the novel, however, it is bound to this non-author's intention to close the core of the story, while completely closing the other, the last track is the one who explains, after the suicide of Miss Appleyard, how Irma, moved to Europe and became the Countess de-Margueray milk, has been questioned several times by experts from the Society of Psychical Research (formerly the British agency specialized in the various fields of the paranormal), with no results.
Beloved by critics and variously considered in its formal structure and its links (Danilo Arona, in his pioneering fantacinema Guide, published by Gamma books in 1978 and now unobtainable, speaks of cinema "paralovecraftiano"), the film load symbols in visual form, following Peter Weir directing the figures of those years to make a film of great formal elegance, open for most of the time in day care spaces long shot and very long, except for some internal sequences that recall the dark at night, often using cross fades that the figure of the swan and the face / white body of Miranda, but mostly centered his speech on the vision dell'Hanging Rock, to an extent greater than it has done Lindsay.
It 's the paradox, or one of the many paradoxes of the intersection between literature and cinema; Australian literature for key player in the landscape itself, from which one can not separate the authors, it is the Nobel Prize Patrick White, the fugitive as Boyd Martin and Christina Stead, the large group of writers (it will take to open the globalization a gap in this traditional arrangement), and consequently the Australian film opens with these spaces, but in the narrative of the non-Lindsay said the landscape and its resonances, the mythical element, the relationship with the "other" cultures, ends with the yield to complex or too simple psychology of the protagonists. So the film Weir seizes the opportunity to bring color, light, images and sounds at the center of the debate.
The group of related sequences are two, given that all the crosses often in scenic: the first centered on the picnic itself and sull'ascesa girls, the second hand on the research of Michael, the discovery Irma him and then by Albert.
Midpoint, and outstanding explanation of the history, the Hanging Rock and its symbolism back steadily throughout the film, the story ends in a shot (in slow motion) in the sequence in which girls are at the picnic and to start their ascent, with a still image of Miranda, when cultured after greeting Diane de Poitiers is moving towards its destiny.
Ulysses Ursini
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