Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31671 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-30
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, director Peter Weir's lyrical, enigmatic masterpiece is an imaginative tease. The setting is a proper turn-of-the century Australian boarding school for girls, a suffocating institution built on strict moral codes, repressed sexuality, and a subtle but enforced class structure. As the film opens, girls draped in immaculate white dress prepare for a picnic at the nearby volcanic formation, Hanging Rock, and Weir hangs an air of dark foreboding over the proceeding. "You'll have to love someone else, because I won't be here very long," says one virginal girl, Miranda, to her friend. Her words are prophetic: during the picnic, Miranda, along with two other girls and an uptight schoolmistress, vanish into the rocks. While a search party repeatedly returns to the rock to look for either the girls or the reasons for their disappearance, Weir leaves the mystery unsolved. Like Antonioni's L'Avventura, the vanishing is open to numerous interpretations--both rational and illusory--but Weir drops enough allegorical clues that it feels like a parable. He transforms the landscape and weather into menacing and eerie images; outlines of faces can be seen in the rocks, while the oppressive heat beating down on the picnic doubles as an atmospheric metaphor for the girls' unbearable social and sexual confinement. These images and other plot twists toward the end hint that this mysterious vanishing, on some level, was actually a form of spiritual escape--the only out, other than death, from the film's bleak, tightly structured community. Regardless of how you see it, though, this hypnotic puzzle remains the highlight of the '70s Australian New Wave. --Dave McCoy

Special Features
1.77 Wide Screen
16:9 Wide Screen
DVD 5
English
Region 2
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo English
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Scene Access
Interactive Menus

Synopsis
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.

Customer Reviews

A beautiful, enchanting and haunting film
This is a beautiful film, enchanting and haunting. I first saw this film in 1980 and although the images have stayed with me for 20 years the film still has the power to instil a strange sense of loss. We are told at the outset that some of those who set out for the picnic are never to return and the film does not attempt to solve the mystery although various clues are shared with us. The film could be a simple detective tale involving disappearing schoolgirls but the tone is set at the start of the film by Miranda (Anne Louise Lambert) who provides a voice over based on an Edgar Allan Poe poem, "What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream" The film concerns itself with the aftermath of the disappearance and the impact on those involved with the missing girls. It shows how an apparently idyllic way of life is not what it first seems, how this false paradise is fragile and how it is shattered by the breakdown of established order. Hysteria and tensions all surface revealing the claustrophobic atmosphere of the affluent Victorian European way of life in an alien land, and exposing the suppressed passions that are the reality of life. This theme is further expressed by the virginal white dresses the girls wear for the picnic, which seem out of place in this environment and represent the stifling restrictions placed on the young girls. The layers of corset and dresses the girls have to wear also mirror the film's many layers.

The cinematography is stunning being incredibly bright and sunny so that the film actively encourages you to feel the warmth of the sun. The film seduces you with the sounds of the Australian bush and the beauty of the girls, so that you will more feel a sense of the horror, as one of the girls, Edith (Christine Schuler), does. The flashback at the end of the film, poignantly coupled with the Adagio from Beethoven's 5th piano concerto (Emperor), leaves you with a sense of loss of youth and innocence. ...

The film is faithful to Joan Lindsay's novel, though dialogue is often replaced with visual impressions and unnecessary details are excluded to maintain the sense of mystery the author intended. The film is beautifully shot with haunting music, well cast and acted and tightly directed, for me it is a masterpiece of its time, and still rates as one of my favourite films today.

A perfect piece of movie magic
MAGICAL & ENCHANTING

This atmospheric film has been in my top 5 movies of all time for many years and will remain there forever. This film is about mood, and it is both beautifully entrancing and ominously mesmerizing.
Tension is created between the beautiful cinematography and the underlying sense of dread, at first subtly and then more intensely as the plot unfolds. I suppose it is a type of psychothriller if classifiable at all. The austere old headmistress is very impressive, as are the teachers and the young girls in their Victorian innocence. Tension mounts on the way to the rock and something happens there, of which small hints are given, but the mystery will never be revealed. The soundtrack by the Romanian pan-pipe master George Zamfir expertly enhances the different moods of the movie. Having once seen Hanging Rock, one can never forget it.

Cut scenes diminish a film that was a work of art
This landmark in Australian Cinema is certainly amongst my very favourite films. Ordinarily, I would score this film 5 stars, but as another reveiwer points out, key scenes, in my opinion vital to fleshing out the characters and plotlines, have been cut. Oddly, a totally irrelevant and superfluous scene of a reporter photographing the school has been inserted. Several scenes involving Michael, Irma, Albert and Mrs Appleyard have been edited out, and their loss is pointless and certainly diminishes the film as a whole.
My view is one of a languid, sensual dreamlike film, suffused with mystery, focusing on the reactions and feelings of the characters to the tragedy/mystery on the rock. To cut approximately six minutes from the film, is not to add to the mystery surrounding the girls disappearance, but to simply disrupt continuity, and to make scenes and developments seem unconnected and senseless, for example, the cutting of both the crash sound as sarah plummets through the conservatory roof, and the scene of Mrs Appleyard gathering her things together, the viewer could be understandably confused, and not connect the unrecognisable corpe amid the pansies with the vanished Sarah.
I for one will be digging my neglected video of this film out of my loft to watch in preference to this edit-fest of a dvd version.