Latest news with #PicnicatHangingRock
Time Out
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
A haunting new adaptation of 'The Birds' lands at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre
It's been more than 70 years since Daphne du Maurier wrote The Birds, the gothic short story that famously inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film of the same name. Decades later, it remains one of the most unsettling tales ever told. Now, Malthouse Theatre is bringing this classic thriller to the stage in a bold new form: a reimagined one-woman show starring Paula Arundell (Three Furies, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V). Adapted by Louise Fox and directed by former Malthouse artistic director Matthew Lutton (Picnic at Hanging Rock), the new production blends psychological horror with cutting-edge audio technology to create a truly immersive experience. As the theatre darkens and you don a pair of headphones, prepare for your pulse to race. The stunning sound design by J. David Franzke uses binaural sound – a 360-degree audio technique – to drag you into the haunting tale where a coastal town is under supernatural siege from a flock of birds. Arundell performs with tiny microphones in her ears, capturing every whisper, gasp, flap, screech and swoop as though it is terrifyingly close.
New Statesman
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Picnic at Hanging Rock's vision of girlhood
Photo by GTO / Album - Image Once voted the best Australian film of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's 1975 film adaptation of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsey, might seem, on the surface, an unconventional choice for a cinematic national treasure. Light on plot and vague in its explanations, it's a film of woozy, art-house strangeness. But the dream-like imagery and the mystery at its core cast a spell over viewers, and it became a key film of Australian New Wave cinema, helping drive forward a postwar cinematic boom. Fifty years on, both the novel and its cinematic sibling endure. Echoes of the film's distinct style can be found in everything from the films of Sofia Coppola to the fashion of Valentino, and even Gen Z's ultra-feminine 'coquette' fashion trend. Set in 1900 at an elite girls' boarding school in a remote corner of Australia, the story feels both specific and strangely timeless: a glimpse into a fleeting moment long gone, when Australia was still new to its colonisers and the larger world had so much to be discovered. Opening on Valentine's Day, the pupils at the school – an anachronistic, grand Victorian manor set in the outback – are dizzy with excitement at the prospect of a picnic on nearby natural monolith Hanging Rock. But this excitement is short-lived when three of the girls, and teacher Miss McCraw, mysteriously vanish while exploring. Though one, Irma, is later discovered alive by local boys Albert and Mike, their disappearances begin a chain of tragic events. Lindsay's book is brilliant in its weirdness. From the start, it envelops the reader with an all-knowing atmosphere of impending doom, inviting us to accept that there are mysteries we cannot comprehend. The film is one of those rare adaptations that remains uncannily faithful to the book, without being reductive. It's unusual to find the atmosphere of a novel captured onscreen; dialogue is lifted almost verbatim, and reading it after watching the film makes it difficult to entangle what has been seen, and what has been read on the page. It's only towards the end of the novel where book and film diverge, with the novel ramping up the tragedy and melodrama and pulling the threads of various subplots together. The film prefers to say less, to keep things simple. The 'exquisite languor' the novel describes, the textures on the page, translate perfectly to the screen – the film has lingered in our cultural imaginations in no small part due to its seductive aesthetic, its iconic visual language. The opening scenes are a riot of young girls lacing themselves into white corsets, surrounded by surfaces laden with trinkets. Miranda, one of the young women who goes missing, is described lovingly as a 'Botticelli angel'. They're almost smothered with girlish stuff – roses and cards and pressed flowers, all tastefully soft-lit. Yet under it all, there's a menacing sense of simmering passion. There's something febrile in the way the girls flock around each other, the unselfconsciousness with which tragic young orphan Sara Waybourne recites a love poem for Miranda. Modesty might dictate that they can only remove their gloves, due to the heat, once they've passed through the nearest town, but there's no placidity here, under the layers of frippery. Light floods every scene (until, in some of the grim final scenes, it doesn't). Golden and diffuse, deceptively gentle at times, it has a painterly quality. This isn't surprising, given the cinematography takes inspiration from the Australian impressionists of the late 1800s such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, who portrayed the same kinds of surroundings that the girls would have moved through in hazy, shimmering brushstrokes. Corsets and long skirts, stockings and boots are woefully inadequate for an Australian summer, but shots of the girls lounging on baking rocks, or half-hidden by luscious ferns, are visually startling and lovely as well as historically accurate. As in many of these pictures, the contrast between these artificial refinements, and the landscape they're placed in, is jarring. Beyond the school and the surroundings of the rock are lawn parties, where a band plays 'God Save the Queen' and the guests drink champagne. These colonial trappings seem more than faintly absurd in the arid and mysterious surroundings. Meanwhile, back at the rock they cut into a heart-shaped Valentine's Day cake that would seem more at home at a child's birthday party, iced exuberantly and bursting at the seams. It is soon forgotten, swarmed by ants. Symbolism like this abounds: nature, despite attempts to colonise and tame it, is full of mysteries we can't even imagine – and arrogance can only lead to a downfall. The strange mix of unfamiliar nature and beribboned girlhood, enchant and disorient viewers. The experience of watching it is easy to submit to, as the sounds and images wash over the audience. Dialogue is spoken as if characters are in a trance, or reciting a prophecy. 'What we see, and what we seem, is but a dream: a dream within a dream,' a languorous voiceover intones at the start. The fragile pan pipes of the soundtrack lull us further. But there's a hallucinogenic shift when the girls reach the rock – the music building, synths operatic and soaring, as they leave their recognisable world behind, and we are plunged into the realm of the unknowable for the rest of the film. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This central unknowability is compelling: not just the mystery of the missing girls, but both the film and the novel's attempts to grapple with a larger sense of the incomprehensibility of nature's vastness, and our relative tininess within the universe. Time is so flimsy; throughout the film and the book, the stopping of clocks is a regular motif. Irma comments, dreamily, on how the faraway people on the ground look like 'ants' from their vantage point on the rock, and how 'a surprising number of human beings are without purpose'. Unfathomable patterns are set in place, they are merely pawns within them. But they don't seem to be alarmed; Miranda, the enigmatic centre of their group, even seems to be prepared for her fate somehow, hinting to Sara that she will be gone soon, and murmuring, on the rock itself, 'Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.' Girlhood then, in the film, is both a place of innocence and a place of tragic possibility. I felt it too, as a teenager living with one foot in the day-to-day life of rural Wales, and another in a dreamy universe of my own making, of all-consuming friendships, albeit with diaries and mixtapes in place of the pressed flowers and Valentine's cards strewn around the opening scenes of the film. In fields and school corridors I was often bored, but sometimes had the eerie, prickly feeling that there was more to the universe than met the eye. The girls who go missing do not seem quite of this world, with the preternatural beauty of cherubim and their strange, distant statements on time and human nature. Maybe it is this which allows them to vanish into thin air, some kind of receptiveness to mysteries beyond human comprehension. But there's no escaping a more prosaic kind of girlhood, the trappings of their social status as elegant young women-in-training. The vanishings grip the community around the school because of the beauty and youth of the girls. When Irma is found, the doctor assures the adults that she is 'intact'; Mrs Appleyard is surprised at the vanishing of Miss McCraw, thinking her 'masculine intellect' would surely render her immune to any mysterious silliness. Such an environment of repression is a perfect setting for hysteria to take hold. Perhaps it's this acknowledgement of girlhood's complexity that appeals to young women more than anything else in the film. When Irma returns to say goodbye to her friends she isn't greeted with love, but with a sullenness that erupts into hysterical violence, the girls descending upon her as if to tear her to shreds. On one hand, girlhood is ribbons and ruffles. On the other it's viciousness and strangeness. It contains an energy, always under the surface, that can't be repressed forever. Anyone who's ever been a teenage girl, or met one, can attest to that. The tension bubbles throughout the novel and film, and finally breaks through, with devastating effects. With everything falling apart, the film that started drenched in such sunny radiance tips into pure nightmare. Hints of psychedelia become stronger and more twisted, the colours grow darker. Mrs Appleyard descends into her own vortex of cruelty and madness, and the sense of claustrophobia as things crumble spectacularly is all the more powerful given how happy the earlier scenes were. One of the final images of the film – Mrs Appleyard sitting dressed in a lavish funeral outfit, the photographic negative of the white lace gowns elsewhere in the film, manic eyes fixed on an indeterminate point ahead of her – is deeply unsettling. Like the ants devouring the cake, there's a nastiness under the surface niceness of civilisation. One way to keep people invested in a mystery, enchanted by it, is to keep it very much as a mystery – we never find out what happened to the girls, either in the film or in the original edition of the novel. When an 'excised' chapter offering concrete explanations was published in 1987, the reaction was largely negative (I've read it; I wouldn't recommend it). Rewatching it, I was reminded of how fervently readers on social media have taken to the novel I Who Have Never Known Men, another story without a neat conclusion, in which the appeal is in the untangling of the universe's mysteries rather than a neat plot. Narrative-wise, there's always something appealing about a mystery we can feverishly speculate over ourselves. Perhaps it's best to leave some of them unsolved, with the beauty being in what's unknown, and in the interpretations that spring up around them. [See also: There is no contemporary fiction] Related
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Ugly Stepsister review – body-horror take on Cinderella is ingenious reworking of fairy tale
Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt makes her feature debut with an ingenious revisionist body-horror version of Cinderella, lavishly costumed and designed. There are twists in the style of David Cronenberg and Walerian Borowczyk, with (maybe inevitably) echoes of Carrie and Alien. In one scene, there could even be a nod to Picnic at Hanging Rock. Cynical widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) remarries a well-heeled widower somewhere in 18th-century central Europe; he then makes her a widow for the second time by fatally gorging on cake at the wedding breakfast. As a result, Rebekka is left financially embarrassed with her plain daughter Elvira (Lea Myren), Elvira's kid sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) and a new stepdaughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), a beautiful young woman who haughtily resents the ugly Elvira. Instead of paying for a funeral for her late husband, Rebekka lets his body rot somewhere in the house while spending money on bizarre cosmetic treatments for Elvira – brutal nose- and eyelash-remodelling – in the hope that Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) will choose her for his bride at his forthcoming ball. But Elvira rashly swallows a tapeworm to allow her to indulge a passion for cakes (Ozempic not being available in those days) and calamity approaches. Amusingly, Blichfeldt upends expectations about which of the two female leads truly is the cruel and vain stepsister, and which therefore has the authentic inner beauty. As with the original version, there is a plot hole with regard to the trying-on-the-slipper scene: surely the Prince can see from faces who is, and is not, his true love. Or … maybe it isn't a plot hole? Perhaps the body-appendage fetishism taking precedence over facial recognition is the point. This is a movie hyper-aware of the sexual and patriarchal imagery of Cinderella, a film in the post-feminist tradition of Angela Carter and, unlike Michael Pataki's lowbrow 1977 porn-musical version, it avoids the obvious sexual symbolism of the foot in the slipper. Blichfeldt has made an elegant debut. The Ugly Stepsister is in US cinemas now, and UK and Irish cinemas from 25 April
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Picnic at Hanging Rock at 50: how a low-budget whodunnit became a cultural juggernaut
Half a century after it landed in cinemas, the extent of Picnic at Hanging Rock's enduring legacy seems both astonishing and improbable. This half-a-million-dollar bush whodunnit, in which a group of schoolgirls and their teacher inexplicably disappear during an outing to Hanging Rock in central Victoria on Valentine's Day 1900, has managed to make its mark among fashion's foremost names, infiltrate the world of teen magazines, and run an implausible gamut of cinematic influence. Alexander McQueen riffed on it in 2005; 20 years later, brands like Zimmermann are still turning Picnic into runway fodder in Paris. Sofia Coppola referenced it twice, first for a Marc Jacobs ad, and then again for her gauzy, sexy remake of The Beguiled. Today the film counts a new demographic in its ever-growing fanbase: cosmopolitan 20-somethings. Last year Peter Weir attended a screening of Picnic at the Cinemathèque française in Paris; he believes about 80% of attendees were young people. As Picnic marks its 50th anniversary, feted with a 4K rerelease, the director has a few theories about why the film has proved so evergreen. 'Not only is the mystery at the heart of the film unsolved,' Weir says, 'but there is no message in the film. No lecture, no polemic. Picnic belongs to the viewer.' Others find the film's success a bit of a head-scratcher. 'I truly love all of Peter Weir's films,' says Jacki Weaver, who played Minnie, the sympathetic maid at exclusive all-girls' boarding school Appleyard College. 'But Picnic is probably my second least favourite. That it has achieved a place in the pantheon is a tribute to the film-making genius of Peter Weir – and a mystery to me.' Picnic's journey to the pantheon began with a conversation in early 1973. Children's TV host Patricia Lovell – an aspiring producer, and a one-time colleague of Weir – had read Joan Lindsay's ethereal, idiosyncratic 1967 novel and recognised its cinematic potential. She wanted to know if the director – only 28, and yet to helm a full-length feature – agreed. Three months later, Lovell and Weir were in Langwarrin, 50km south of Melbourne, staking their claim to Picnic in the author's living room. 'Joan's main concern was the ending,' says Weir. 'If I'd suggested we had to have a solution to the mystery of the girls' disappearance I would, politely, have been shown the door.' Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Weir and Lovell's timing was perfect. By 1973 Australian film-makers had embraced the influence of 60s European art cinema, been liberated from the nation's tawdry history of cultural censorship, and were enjoying, for the first time, a suite of government-funded initiatives intended to revive the nation's moribund industry. The fruits of this era, dubbed the Australian New Wave, include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Newsfront, My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant. Picnic at Hanging Rock, filmed in just over a month in early 1975, arrived at the crest of this wave: a perfect convergence of the right people at the right point in their careers. At the time, then-Sydney film festival director David Stratton – who visited the set – wrote of the 'pervasive feeling among everyone concerned that something very special was in the making'. Kim Dalton, second AD on Picnic, remembers it similarly: 'Clearly it had a resonance, potentially a poetry, a narrative that lifted it above just the normal run-of-the-mill feature film,' he says. 'I think everybody felt that.' That Picnic still casts so potent a spell rests as much upon its ambiguous ending as its iconic, sumptuous aesthetic: frilled lace dresses, sheaths of summer bushland, beautiful girls captured with a halo of backlight in moods of gaiety and longing. A helping of Beethoven's Emperor concerto, as well as editor Max Lemon's penchant for artsy superimposition, elevates the film's haughty airs. Where early-70s Australian films leaned into the colourful, ribald and commercial, Picnic was the departure, a decisive charge towards art. Visual references include British photographer David Hamilton, as well as Botticelli's Renaissance masterpiece Primavera, Frederic Leighton's Flaming June and, of course, William Ford's At the Hanging Rock. Pop artist Martin Sharp, who'd made album covers for Cream and been tried for obscenity while editing countercultural magazine Oz, also happened to be the world's foremost expert on Joan Lindsay's book. Weir kept him on hand as the film's 'artistic adviser'. Weaver fondly recalls Weir's 'delicate aesthetic sensibilities'. 'Peter possesses a fine intellect,' she says. 'The soul of a poet.' Turning up each day in a straw hat and sandals, he liked playing background music to generate atmosphere on set. 'Peter's persona was absolutely in keeping with the mood of the film,' says Dalton. 'There was something slightly ethereal about him.' If Weir concocted the ethereal, it was Russell Boyd's job to capture it. His photography wrung a liquid lusciousness out of Australian light that has secured Picnic's hallowed place in the annals of Tumblr and Instagram film fandom. He shifted frame rates, draped silk sheets in the tree line, and shot the girls' final minutes of innocence with, yes, a wedding veil over the lens. Sometimes his brilliance bubbled up extemporaneously. When a generator went crashing down the slopes of the Rock, Boyd ad-libbed a bounce light with some sheets of polystyrene. ('The sort of thing you make coolers out of,' he would later recall.) Assisted by John Seale – who would later win an Oscar for shooting The English Patient – Boyd made working on the Rock look easy; in fact it was anything but. This, after all, wasn't an orderly film set but an ancient volcanic formation. Hanging Rock – or Ngannelong – had served as a site of ceremony for Wurundjeri, Taungurung, and Dja Dja Wurrung men for tens of thousands of years. Judith Dorsman, costume designer on Picnic, tells Guardian Australia of her almost sisyphean struggle to keep everything pristine while shooting in the bush. 'All those white gloves,' she recalls. 'We had six million pairs of white gloves. Everything was white. And you're on a rock. My God.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Production soon decamped to Martindale Hall, a Georgian villa nestled in South Australia's Clare Valley, doubling as Appleyard College. Graham Walker, prop guy on Picnic, had a mansion to dress and no money to dress it with. With charisma and knack for improvisation, he made do. 'I'd find places, hire, buy, steal, borrow and get it back, all out of a Volkswagen Kombi van,' he says. 'Later I'd have people ring saying, 'That bed we lent you – when are you bringing it back?'' 'It was a wonderful shoot,' says Weaver. 'Like a long summer camp.' For the producing team, however, it was less idyllic. A week from her first shooting day, Picnic's top-billing star, Oscar-winning British actor Vivian Merchant, told the team she had pneumonia and could no longer play headmistress Mrs Appleyard. In the scramble for a replacement, six actors were contacted; only Welsh Bafta-winner Rachel Roberts was available. 'She was, I think, a terrible shock to everybody,' Pat Lovell told Cinema Papers in 1976, 'because I don't quite know whether the McElroys [the film's producers, Hal and Jim McElroy] or Peter realised how powerful an actress she was.' Powerful is putting it mildly. Her performance – intricate down to the alveolar trills – lends this rough-hewn bush flick its true star quality. But Roberts, a longtime alcoholic, managed to make some equally spectacular drama off screen. One night during the shoot, according to a 2004 documentary, she ran out of her motel room naked, hooting and yelling in the courtyard, as cast and crew watched on with bemusement. On other days, Guardian Australia was told, she could barely leave her motel room. Yet she was, beneath it all, a thespian to the bone: as Weir said in February, Roberts even refused to wear the wig made for Merchant because, in the traditions of the English theatre, it was not the done thing. 'Fame has to be left on the outskirts of the set,' says Weir. 'Once an actor crosses into that magic circle they have a job to do. The best, like Rachel, understand this.' At the time of its release, Picnic was the most seen and best reviewed Australian film to date. Its months-long run in domestic cinemas saw it gross $1.5m by March 1976. No Australian film had felt so consequential. 'Picnic was the first Australian film of that generation that was a serious film and an enormous success,' says Stratton. He remembers people seeing it 'again and again because they were trying to work out what happened'. Although US distributors didn't pick up on Picnic until 1979, it had by then broken into several far-flung markets. Audiences admired it at Cannes and in Canada; the Italians gave it a baroque poster and retitled it Il lungo pomeriggio di morte – The Long Afternoon of Death. The costume designer, Judith Dorsman, recalls how in the years after Picnic's release, its famed dresses were 'all hired out to girls to wear for weddings when they got married. They were worn to death. Every man and his dog got married in them'. The only one who didn't go for it, apparently, was Joan Lindsay. Speaking to Film Quarterly in 1980, Weir recalled that Lindsay had 'considerable reservations' about the film upon its release. 'You've changed the tone,' she told him. 'I didn't write it with that kind of feeling.' Weir's film is a haunted repertory of beautiful dreams, heraldic visions, memories gained and lost. If Lindsay had ensured her ambiguous ending would be respected, she could do nothing to prevent a cast and crew of great artists from feeling their way into the gaps of her story. The result was an art film with an Australian touch, ever beguiling all these years later – a film which, after five decades, still belongs to its viewers. The new 4K digital restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock is screening at Palace cinemas in Melbourne, Ballarat, Sydney, Brisbane, Byron Bay, Canberra and Perth from until 16 April.
CairoScene
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Arab Models Strutting Through Paris Fashion Week
Chanel, Zimmerman and more played host to a slew of the region's best models. Mar 12, 2025 Arab models are making their presence felt at Paris Fashion Week, bringing elegance and edge to some of the world's biggest fashion houses. French-Saudi model Amira Al Zuhair was a vision in Zimmermann's Ready-to-Wear Collection, embodying the Australian brand's signature blend of femininity and mysticism. Inspired by the cult film Picnic at Hanging Rock, the collection evoked an earthy romance, perfectly mirrored in Al Zuhair's burnt-orange ensemble. A fitted, sleeveless bodice gave way to a gathered, flowing skirt that exuded ethereal elegance. With ruching that billowed as she moved, she evoked a Grecian statue in motion, complemented by strappy brown sandals and asymmetrical gold chandelier earrings. Loose waves and natural makeup added to the mythical, regal air Zimmermann is known for. But Al Zuhair wasn't the only Arab model making an impression. British-Moroccan model Nora Attal and French-Algerian model Loli Bahia both took to the Chanel runway, wearing the house's Fall Collection—coquette charm meets classic Chanel structure. Tweed, ribbons, and bows were reimagined with signature Parisian finesse, as Attal and Bahia carried the collection's delicate, romantic energy with ease.
