By Janus Films has premiered the trailer for the new 50th Anniversary 4K restoration of celebrated filmmaker Peter Weir’s iconic 1975 mystery feature “Picnic at Hanging Rock”.
A cornerstone of the Australian New Wave and often considered one of the greatest Australian films ever made, the film is set on Valentine’s Day 1900 in the Australian state of Victoria as a private girls’ boarding school goes on a day long excursion to the nearby geological formation Hanging Rock.
During the day three students and one teacher vanish without a trace. A fourth girl, bruised and panic can’t remember what happened. Police searches find nothing, days later one of the girls is found barely alive, delirious and with no memory.
Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse, Vivean Gray and Jacki Weaver star in the film which at the time of release was widely (and incorrectly) regarded as being based on a true story, but was an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel which was entirely fictional.
A commercial and critical success, the film was praised for its eerie atmosphere, dream-like sound design and haunting visuals, and rich thematics with issues of class, colonialism and sexual repression.
It was also an international breakthrough film for Weir who went on to make multiple classics including “Gallipoli,” “Witness,” “Dead Poets Society,” “The Mosquito Coast,” “The Truman Show,” “The Last Wave,” “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “Green Card” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”.
Janus Films is giving the film a January 31st theatrical re-release in New York at the IFC Center. The film had 4K disc versions released from both Second Sight and Criterion released in the past few years, both of which came under criticism for the overuse of DNR. It’s not clear if this is simply reusing one of those versions, or has undergone a different (and hopefully better) restoration effort.
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