Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection Movie Streaming
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Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection Movie Streaming.
Movie Title: Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection is available for streaming or downloading. Click Here to Stream or Download Picnic at Hanging Rock - Criterion Collection |
Do films get much stranger or more beautiful than this? To call Peter Weir’s masterpiece “moody” and “atmospheric”, as Leonard Maltin does in his brief review, is to grossly underemphasize the sui generis, quite visceral impact, the lush, almost swoon-inducing power, of this flagrantly bizarre work of art. It’s actually difficult to describe “Picnic at Hanging Rock” in words because there’s nothing else remotely like it. I’d say that another Australian film, “Heavenly Creatures” comes closest, but that movie’s cumbersome claymation fantasy scenes and decisive conclusion are so far removed from the ethereal, open-ended nature of this film that the comparison falls apart instantly. There’s something so unmentionably chilling, even nauseating, in the soft-focus camera-work and the intentionally stilted performances, that I’m not even able to evaluate the technical aspects of this film. It has its own vernacular, its own code, that owes nothing to what has come before. If forced, I’d say this is a story about repression, about humanity-vs.-nature, about our own inability to really grasp the vastness of the universe in which we live. It is certainly much more than the story of three girls and a school teacher who dissapear on a rock formation, as intruiging as that story certainly is. There are ideas at work here, conveyed through camera shots, angles, brief snatches of dialogue and silent pauses that we might not even be able to discuss, because we don’t have the words or the courage to discuss them. Those expecting a genteel horror story of some sort or a traditional murder mystery will be confounded by “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, for it offers only questions, not answers. It taps into our deepest fears, but without ever resorting to tricks or gore. It creeps up on you and, when it is over, changes your perception of the world for days to come. I find it a terrifying movie, far more unsettling than any slasher pic or ghost tale. Its ambiguity is the key to its success. That ambiguity unnerves us because we like to have everything labelled and identified, plotted out in a rational manner. There is nothing rational about “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. It opens a small crack in the abyss and then forces our imaginations to look through that crack.
Sadly, like George Lucas before him, Peter Weir has replaced one beloved cut of the film that made his name, re-edited it and (so it seems) determined to keep the original version under lock and key. Bad move.
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Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those films that should have been left alone, but unfortunately Peter Weir’s considerably shorter director’s cut does the film no real favors. The additions are minor - a redundant scene of a reporter photographing the school and a very brief but much better introduction to the scene where Albert (Wolf Creek’s John Jarrett) tells Michael (Dominic Guard) his dream about his sister - but the deletions in the last third are fairly substantial and surprisingly damaging - most notably the entire section of Irma thanking Albert for finding her on the Rock, Michael’s growing relationship with Irma, the church service, Albert and Michael talking at night, and Mrs Appleyard removing Sarah’s belongings. Sadly, while it may make the film even more elliptical as is Weir’s wont, it diminishes the film’s resonance and your involvement with the already rather sketchy characters, so it’s a pity that only the director’s cut now exists in a restored version (even the Australian 2-disc DVD only includes the cut scenes as extras).
Unfortunately, a la George Lucas, the original version is almost impossible to find aside from an incredibly poor standards conversion videotape made from a poor print back in the mid-90s before the Australian film industry took film preservation seriously.
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The restoration may look and sound better than the film ever has before, but it’s a sad trade-off for the much better film Weir originally made.
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