Don Gibson Theater: Film Weekend - Picnic at Hanging Rock

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH AT 7:30PM

The first international hit film out of Australia... and one of the single most enduring mysteries in the history of cinema. The film serious movie fans (and Australian tourists) have obsessed over for more than three decades...

ROGER EBERT says...
A film of haunting mystery and buried hysteria... The viewer is like the girls in the film who went along on the picnic and returned safely. For us, as for them, the characters who disappear remain always frozen in time, walking out of view, never to be seen again... Certain shots seem to suggest faces in the rock, as if the visitors are being watched... The underlying suggestion is that Victorian attitudes coupled with the mysteries of an ancient land lead to events the modern mind cannot process.

TIME OUT (UK) says...

Three girls and a teacher from an exclusive Australian academy unaccountably vanish while visiting a local beauty spot... As for the mystery we're left to conclude that it can only be explained in terms beyond human understanding... Tensions remain underscored while the atmospherically beautiful images merely entice and divert. The result is a discreetly artistic horror film.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE says...
One of the most hauntingly beautiful mysteries ever created on film... The delicate arts of nuance and superstition, nearly banished from filmmaking in an era of overdone, dumbed down stars and special effects movies, are the all-important ingredients... What's at the surface is only one layer of Weir's hypnotic, disturbingly seductive film.... Picnic suggests a timelessness, as if life simply goes on no matter what foolish humans do.... Visually hypnotic at every turn.

AMAZON says...
Situated somewhere between supernatural horror and lush Victorian melodrama, Peter Weir's lyrical, enigmatic masterpiece is a imaginative tease... This hypnotic puzzle remains the highlight of the 70's Australian wave.

ABOUTFILM.COM says...
In Picnic at Hanging Rock, director Peter Weir's second feature film, Weir explores what happens when long disregarded and discounted pagan forces touch the inhabited world of Victorian/Edwardian era society in Australia... It's no simple mystery... Appleyard College comes into direct, visceral contact with unseen forces - forces about which the film's characters have little knowledge, and what knowledge they do have is scholarly and theoretical... A highly absorbing and thought provoking two hours.