Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10197 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

Magnificent classic, but why cut it?
As other contributors have pointed out, the landscapes, characterisation, atmosphere of mystery and the haunting music make this one of the greatest movies of all time.

All I want to say is, if anyone discovers a commercial DVD source with the complete version on it, please will they put it up on this site. I have an old VHS tape with the full version, which I have transferred to disc, but obviously the quality has deteriorated over the years.

If Peter Weir ever reads this, please change your mind! Your first edit was pure genius.

A Flawed Gem
I am rather cross at Criterion Collection for not providing the scenes that have been deleted, subtitles, a director's commentary (especially in consideration of their prices), and also for leading some viewers down the garden path by suggesting that "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a horror film. Therefore, I have given four stars to what used to be a five-star film.

When I first saw this film years ago I was spellbound, and although I still find it compelling, some of its magic has dissipated, perhaps due to the ravages of time and poor conservation (in a film which has been beautifully restored in respect to quality of color). It is difficult to believe that this is the "director's cut," since many significant scenes--as noted by others--have disappeared (The one that I recall is of the math teacher rising as if in a trance and slowly following the path of the girls up the mountain, and into oblivion.).

Despite these flaws, "Picnic at Hanging Rock" still exerts a mesmerising fascination in its imagery: the young girls in white seem to have stepped out of a painting by John Singer Sargent into an Australian summer; the stunning landscape--not only the brooding rock of the title, but also the eucalypts, the serpent, the koalas, and kookaberras--suggests an atavistic menace in which anything might be possible. The plaintive piping of the pan flute and the melancholy slow movement of the Beethoven piano concerto also contribute a haunting atmosphere that is unforgettable.

Viewing "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is rather like looking into an Australian opal. Its almost kaleidoscopic shifts of sequence generate as many interpretations as there are viewers: to some it is a psychological coming of age film that portrays sexual repression and transgression; others see it in terms of myth, impressionism, allegory, and even magical realism. For those who want instant answers, "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which raises more questions than it answers, is none of these.

Such persons are immune to magic!

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.