Picnic at Hanging Rock silent outtakes: Girls in a trance

When Peter Weir was filming his 1975 masterwork Picnic at Hanging Rock, the artist Martin Sharp played an important role on the set as artistic adviser. After the shoot, he kept a collection of 35mm trims and outtakes, not included in either the original 1975 edit or the 1988 director’s cut, which he later donated to the National Film and Sound Archive. Soundless, fragmentary, the outtakes act as a dream-like augmentation to the hypnotic beauty of Weir’s film, and give insights into the processes and preoccupations of the filmmakers. 

Weir says that to Sharp, the outtakes were ‘significant, even magical. This was consistent with his concept, as an artist, of the whole experience. Just as the book held hidden meanings, so did the shards of film.’  

This series of outtakes focuses on the four schoolgirls, showing their slow, tranced climb through the crevices of the Rock; the circle they make around a boulder, echoing a child’s game or witches’ ritual; Irma playfully hiding in a hollow of the Rock; a white swan, which is associated with Miranda; and Miranda herself, looking back over her shoulder in the gardens of Appleyard College. Her whimsical pose echoes Mademoiselle de Poitiers’ last sight of her, in the lyrical afternoon light, at which she exclaims, ‘Miranda is a Botticelli angel’ – but here the angel seems half-swallowed by the dark.   

In our interview with Peter Weir, the director remembers the ‘strange, beautiful and haunting’ world of the film, and talks about how he shaped it.

With special thanks to Peter and Ingrid Weir.