Word: weire
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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...
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by Cliff Green...
...could be objected that this failure to come up with a realistic denouement is a fault, but it is one that the film shares with works like L'Avventura and Blow-Up, whose director, Michelangelo Antonioni, has obviously had an influence on Peter Weir. As in the master's work, the criminal, if there is one, is society. It does not matter to Weir whether there was a sexual criminal lurking up there among the rocks, awaiting these young women who are easy prey, or if their own erotic repression led to some self-destructive hysterical...
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...