- Blurb -
Peter Weir' s haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking. Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man' s ' terra nullius' . She delves into the film' s production history, addressing director Weir' s influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film' s treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the ' eternal feminine' , as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.
- Reviews -
Such an attentive, impassioned awareness of the politics which underscore the figuration of the girl on screen not only offers up a provocative re-reading of a classic film, but it also speaks directly to its gestures of love, of kinship and pleasure which operate outside, and in spite of, patriarchal culture. This is a beautiful book of relevance to any and all interested in the expanding vistas of female subjectivity in film and those real and metaphorical ' rocks' which might lodge, vociferously, between such positions of imagination, selfhood and desire. -- Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University, UK A beautifully constructed analysis of a complex and haunting film. Backman Rogers skillfully dissects the patriarchal working environment of Patricia Lovell' s project to realize a faithful rendering of Joan Lindsay' s perplexing novel while also offering a subtle reading of the film via its distinctive cinematography. A tour de force of feminist film analysis, intellectual clarity and cinephilia. -- Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds, UK This is a ravishing book. Anna Backman Rogers passionately honours the enchantment of Picnic at Hanging Rock, its veiled images, the love between Miranda and Sarah, its languor, ' the slow bleed from morning into afternoon' . Yet she also, in coruscating prose, shows quite brilliantly how the film decries the horror of empire and the ' violence wrought on the female body' , then and now. I urge you to read this book, to enter its dream. -- Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge, UK
- Author Bio -
Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis-Image (2015), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019), and Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden' s Wanda (2020). She is also the co-editor of three books on feminism and visual culture with Laura Mulvey and Boel Ulfsdotter. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture.
- Full Details -
Status: | Active |
ISBN-13: | 9781839023354 |
Published: | 6 Oct 2022 |
Published In: | United Kingdom |
Imprint: | British Film Institute/BBC |
Publisher: | British Film Institute |
Format: | Paperback |
Height: | 190mm |
Width: | 135mm |
Pages: | 104 |
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