Picnic At Hanging Rock Essay

The Mystery of Hanging Rock: Time Abandoned In director Peter Weir’s thought-provoking film Picnic at Hanging Rock, Marion and Miranda, two students and their teacher Miss McCraw undertake an outing to Hanging Rock, a mysterious red monolith well outside the boundaries of their prim finishing school in Victorian Australia. Their subsequent disappearance and its inexplicable nature underscore the contrasts between the human world and the natural world. By discarding some of the constraints of the human world such as clothing and time and embracing some of the elements of the natural world, the characters can be thought to enter a natural spirituality, like the Australian “dreamtime. While this cosmic revelation is offered to others at Hanging Rock, not all that travel the pathway are ready to give up their human constraints, as evidenced by fellow students Edith and Irma. The power of Hanging Rock is even extended to Sara, a student who was able to avail herself of the natural world while in the confines of the school. There is a striking difference in the film between the natural world and the human world. The natural world can be most clearly seen through the images of Hanging Rock itself. The mountain is ancient, vast, and mysterious and
On the picnic, Miranda is shown carefully examining a flower with a magnifying glass. It is in this way that humankind seeks to understand. It seeks to destroy the whole in order to better know each individual part. But so often nature is not a sum of its individual parts, but instead can only be understood when looked at in relationship to everything else with which it is inexorably bound. It is only when Miranda puts down the magnifying glass and goes to look at and experience the rock as a whole that she enters into and understands the natural world for what it truly