Picnic at Hanging Rock

Today, 8 October, is Cold Dew (寒露).

In 2026 Cold Dew falls on 8 October at 14:29 Beijing time: the seventeenth solar term, the fifth of autumn, and the first to carry the character 寒 — cold. The dew is on the point of freezing. Summer ends on this day.

Both films recommended today are about a summer that is already over. This one is set on 14 February 1900 — high summer in the southern hemisphere, Valentine's Day. At noon two schoolgirls' watches stop at twelve, and then they walk into the rock and never come back.

Why recommend it today?

First, the archive previously held not a single film from Oceania. Australian cinema went through a revival in the 1970s, and this 1975 film is its most celebrated product: in a 1996 poll run by the Victorian Centenary of Cinema Committee and the National Film and Sound Archive, it was voted the greatest Australian film ever made.

Second, it is a mystery film that refuses to answer its own question. At its American premiere in 1975 a distributor threw his coffee cup at the screen because he had been given "a mystery without a goddamn solution". Half a century on, that refusal is exactly what makes it feel modern: it hands the explanation back to the audience.

Third, the site offers joints. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) also puts a child at the threshold of an adult world she cannot interpret; The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) likewise refuses to explain itself and carries everything on a single face; In the Mood for Love (2000) is also about a time that is over and can only be looked back on.

Fourth, it forms a line with the other film running today: both are films in which a national cinema was born — the Australian revival of 1975, the Taiwan New Cinema of 1991. Both use a young person's disappearance or death to write the story of a vanishing world: on one side a colonial order failing in front of a rock, on the other every form of authority in 1960s Taipei collapsing at once.

1900 年 2 月 14 日，情人节。澳大利亚维多利亚州，一所名叫 Appleyard College 的女子学校。

一辆马车把一群穿白裙的女学生和两位教师送到悬崖岩（Hanging Rock）脚下。她们在岩石的阴影里铺开桌布，弹琴，切蛋糕。天气很热，阳光很亮。

下午，四名学生向岩石深处走去。其中一位教师随后也跟了上去。

到了傍晚，只有一个人跑了回来。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film that refuses to give you the answer

Picnic at Hanging Rock premiered at the Hindley Cinema Complex in Adelaide, Australia, on 8 August 1975. It runs 115 minutes, in colour, in English. Directed by Peter Weir, written by Cliff Green from Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel. Cinematography by Russell Boyd, editing by Max Lemon, music by Bruce Smeaton, with the pan flute played by Gheorghe Zamfir.

The novel is itself an elaborate hoax: Lindsay framed it as a true story in her introduction, but it is historical fiction. In a 1974 interview she said: "Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery."

The manuscript contained a chapter explaining the girls' fates, cut before publication and only published separately in 1987 as The Secret of Hanging Rock. The film was adapted from the version without an answer — not an oversight, but its central decision.

The birth of a national cinema

Australia's film revival of the 1970s is known as the Australian New Wave. This was the first Australian film of the period to win both critical acclaim and a large international theatrical release, and it was Weir's breakthrough at home and abroad.

It was financed in part by the South Australian Film Corporation on a budget of roughly A$440,000, and took about A$5.12 million at the Australian box office — over three million of it by 1978. In 1996, in a poll run by the Victorian Centenary of Cinema Committee and the National Film and Sound Archive, it was voted the greatest Australian film ever made.

Weir went on to make Witness (1985), Dead Poets Society (1989), The Truman Show (1998) and Master and Commander (2003). He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, an Academy Honorary Award in 2022, and a lifetime-achievement Golden Lion at Venice in 2024.

How the light was made

Weir and the cinematographer Russell Boyd took their cue from the British photographer and director David Hamilton: they stretched veils of different thicknesses across the lens — Boyd used bridal veil fabric — producing a soft-focus, dreamlike, almost over-exposed image.

There was also a painterly source: the Australian impressionists of the Heidelberg School, and above all Frederick McCubbin's painting Lost (1886). Here is a genuine coincidence: as a young woman Joan Lindsay studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and one of her teachers was McCubbin. The light a novelist learned to look at while training as a painter was put on screen fifty years later.

Shooting began in February 1975 and the main photography took six weeks, at the real Hanging Rock, at Martindale Hall near Mintaro in South Australia (standing in for Appleyard Hall), and at studios in Adelaide. Weir later recalled the atmosphere on location: "There is just something about the area that is oppressive and depressing… everyone was nervous while we were there, and we were all glad to get away at last."

The sound

The main theme comes from the Romanian pan-flute pieces "Doina: Sus Pe Culmea Dealului", with Gheorghe Zamfir on pan flute and Marcel Cellier on organ. The score also uses Bach's Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Romance from Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1, the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, and "God Save the Queen" and "Men of Harlech". A film about a British colony with a European playlist — and the one sound not on that playlist is the pan flute.

CBS released a vinyl LP, A Theme from Picnic at Hanging Rock, in 1976; a 7-inch by the Nolan-Buddle Quartet reached No. 15 on the Australian singles chart the same year. There is still no official commercial soundtrack release.

Reception

92% on Rotten Tomatoes across 48 reviews, average 8.5/10; 81/100 on Metacritic. It won the BAFTA for Best Cinematography (Russell Boyd) and a Saturn Award for Best Cinematography, and took five AACTA nominations including Best Film, Direction, Actress, Supporting Actor and Screenplay.

Vincent Canby in The New York Times (1979): horror "need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes… It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting." Roger Ebert called it "a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria" and noted that it uses two hallmarks of modern Australian cinema: beautiful cinematography, and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home.

Weir recalled the American premiere: one distributor threw his coffee cup at the screen, furious at having "wasted two hours of his life — a mystery without a goddamn solution!" Joan Lindsay was calmer about it: "I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that the thing that happened on St. Valentine's Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles."