The hanging rock piper : Weir, Lindsay, and the spectral fluidity of nothing

Abstract

It is an axiom of film criticism that no single interpretation of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock can resolve its insoluble mystery, or what Gary Hentzi labels its plot's "central absence" (S). Everett Eugene Corum concurs, adding that Picnic's "unclosable situation (is] a result of the director's ambiguity about the events and the metaphors used to describe them" (49). But as Corum rightly observes, Weir's is a "tantalizing ambiguity" that opens Picnic to "possibilities of interpretation" ( 49). Consequently, given that Weir himself contends with David Castell that "the film is as good as [one's] own imagination" (94), one could possibly shed some mythic light on its puzzling proceedings by interpreting them through Marek Haltof 's suggestion that Hanging Rock is not only "a sacred Aboriginal ground" (810), but "a symbol of ancient knowledge, in this context comparable with Aboriginal dreamtime" (820). Worth quoting here is Stephanie Gauper's defining admonition: "our term 'dreamtime' is a misnomer (for] the Aborigines define being in terms of place and space rather than time .... Dreaming is not a time but a symbol, a location, and a source of energy" (213). Intrigued by Gauper's "earth forces" (216), whom she sees claiming Weir's schoolgirls, this paper attempts to chart the latter's hypothetical trajectory in terms of Antero Alli's Hellenic twisting ofDreamtime into an "Aboriginal Neptune" whose constantly shifting waters, obliterating "all sight and perspective," liquefy the abductees into "a state of sightless navigation." Hence Weir's cryptic landscape, with its unfathomable fluidity seeping through what Jonathan Rayner aptly describes as a collage of "time-lapse, slow-motion, unexplained voice-over and omnipotent revelation" (56).