Word: weir
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Weir refuses to solve the mystery. In the end, the rock is the hero-the rock and the thin, adolescent integrity of the girls...
MANY ARTISTS and writers have made the peculiar elusive quality of the Australian land the center of their work. Writers like Patrick White, painters like Sidney Nolan, have celebrated the passive hostility of a continent completely alien and unimaginably ancient. Until recently, there has been no Australian cinema. Peter Weir is one of its pioneers. With the assistance of the South Australian film Corporation, recently established by a culturally alert state Labor government, Weir made Picnic at Hanging Rock. Well-received at the Cannes film Festival in 1976, the film has only recently been released here following the success...
...devices Weir uses in the two films to create suspense are similar: a soundtrack with weird geological-sounding noises, slow sequential shots of troubled faces. The Last Wave,however, takes place in the city, with only fleeting shots of the land, and its mystery is more explicitly "solved" than Picnic...
...Weir's film captures so much of what I experienced of Australia. Lovely pale schoolgirls in white dresses climbing on million-year-old frozen lava, a wry picture of the ridiculous Victorian society that tried so desperately to implant itself on so much of the globe, and here more than anywhere else was so out of place, out of time...
There is something else Weir wants to say-that in society, a sense of order is a very fragile thing. If people do not allow for the inexplicable, then they will collapse of shock when chance makes its inevitable appearance. That is what happens to Mrs. Appleyard, the school's headmistress (Rachel Roberts), and to the little academic world she has created, when the full import of the picnic strikes her. The suicide of a girl who had a crush on one of the victims is the final blow...