Director: Peter Weir / Starring: Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Anne-Louise Lambert, Jacki Weaver, John Jarratt.
On a drowsy St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, a party of girls from a strict boarding school in Australia goes on a day’s outing to Hanging Rock, a geological outcropping not far from their school. Three of the girls and one of their teachers disappear into thin air. One of them is found a week or so later, but can remember almost nothing. The others are never found.
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Three-disc set (1 BD, 2 DVDs)
DVD copy
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Picnic at Hanging Rock concerns a small group of students from an all-female college and a chaperone, who vanish while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.
Special Features: Remastered high-definition digital film transfer, supervised and approved by director Peter Weir, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray / Extended interview with Weir / New piece on the making of the film, featuring interviews from 2003 with executive producer Patricia Lovell, producers Hal McElroy and Jim McElroy, and cast members / New introduction by film scholar David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film / A Recollection . . . Hanging Rock 1900 (1975), an on-set documentary hosted by Lovell and featuring interviews with Weir, actor Rachel Roberts, and source novel author Joan Lindsay / Homesdale (1971), an award-winning black comedy by Weir / Trailer / PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by author Megan Abbott and an excerpt from film critic Marek Haltof’s 1996 book Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide; a new paperback edition of Lindsay’s original novel, previously out of print in the U.S.
