The
Music of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”
Score Analysis/Appreciation
Picnic at Hanging
Rock, one of the strongest films of the Australian cinema renaissance of
the 1970s, owed much of its success to its unique score, which became a point
of note whenever the film was reviewed. (In Britain, the film was criticised
for the allegedly incongruous appropriation of European music over its dry,
antipodean images.)
Dealing with the unsolved disappearance of three girls in their late teens in
Victoria in 1900, the plot takes the form of an unsolved mystery, and is devoid
of a climax. This structure, highly unconventional in that it provides no resolution
to the conflicts raised in the story, did nothing to undermine the film's popularity.
In fact such defiance of the conventional narrative idiom seemed to comprise
the very basis of its success. Audiences were so intrigued by the unanswered
riddle the film posed that they immersed themselves even deeper into it in the
hope that by doing so they might discover its hidden answers for themselves.
In order for this phenomenon to take place without frustration, the makers of
such a film must somehow seduce the viewer to such heights of sensual engagement
that the lack of an ‘ending’ actually enhances his/her cinematic experience.
The way director Peter Weir did this was primarily through music.
The film came out of an era when past conventions were being broken, both sociological
and cinematic. Arguably the most influential film of the sixties, Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey was only six years old when Picnic at Hanging
Rock was made, and its residual influence in 1974 was still great enough
to affect young filmmakers of a new generation making their mark for the first
time. The mystifying and meticulously de-structural plot in 2001 examined spiritual
questions raised by humanity’s expansion into an emotionless universe,
for which it also gave no answers— or at best suggested that whatever answers
do exist are incomprehensible to us. If 2001 could be regarded as a ‘classical’
meditation on the unknown, Picnic at Hanging Rock could also be seen
as a romantic one.
Kubrick himself is known for putting the the work of history’s composers
to the service of his films, and Picnic at Hanging Rock follows the idiom.
It also owes much of its style, both cinematic and musical, to Bo Wiederberg’s
Swedish film of doomed nineteenth century lovers, Elvira Madigan, which
employed a delicate Mozart piano concerto to evoke an ethereal beauty similarly
designed to woo audiences into what is, ultimately, also a dark story. The use
of extra-diegetic classical music in film began in the sixties and served to
break the tradition of the quasi-operatic (‘Wagnerian’) music score
established and clung to by Hollywood, serving similar musical purposes to the
conventional score, but expressing this purpose in the more ironic voice of
a new generation. Thus classical music under film narrative was able both to
flout and conform to cinematic tradition.
The score of Picnic at Hanging Rock proudly followed the fashions of
its era. The 1970s Australian film industry shone with the light of youth, breasting
the future without insulation, and it took its place so confidently in the wider
world that the infamous ‘cultural cringe’ was declared at the time
to be over. “World class” was a description often used by Australian
reviewers in their response to Picnic at Hanging Rock. For its day, the
film had a sophisticated score.
But while much of the film’s music was by past composers (Bach and Beethoven),
there was a new flavour introduced in counterpoint to that approach. Made by
a generation more in love with experimentation than convention, happier to follow
intuition than reason, such experimentation was used in the score of Picnic
at Hanging Rock. The approach is most evident in the scene-setting of the
film. In fact, the narrative structure can be divided into two halves, and each
half was given a different musical treatment.
The first follows the lead-up to the disappearance of the schoolgirls, the mid-point
of the film being the (off-screen) disappearance itself. The second half examines
the ensuing search, and the emotional impact the mystery has on its peripheral
characters. Romantic preoccupations such as an obsession with the dead, together
with guilt, sexual repression, re-incarnation, clairvoyance and the cultural
displacement of colonialism are examined. The whole idea is wrapped up in an
almost palpable beauty. With a dearth of conventional plotting, the film relied
almost entirely on atmosphere to sustain its suspense. It is with the music,
sometimes in counterpoint to and sometimes in harmony with the images, that
the filmmakers most successfully accomplished this atmosphere.
The ‘scene-setting’ music, used prior to the disappearance, was the
most celebrated element in Picnic at Hanging Rock’s score: the famous panpipe
music of Georg Zamfir, who interpeted various folk pieces from the Eastern European
alps for the flute de pan. The story of how the filmmakers disovered this music
tells how, towards the end of the editing process with delivery deadlines looming,
they were unable to come up with any music of an mood truly appropriate to the
story. One of the film’s producers, Hal McElroy, heard a Zamfir LP playing
in a record shop, and knew at once that it would ‘work’. The rights
were acquired and all previous musical ideas for the film’s first half
discarded.
And the pan-pipes do work. Against images of teenage girls happily preparing
for a St Valentine’s Day picnic, they both reflect and subvert the innocence
on display. The film hints at dark undercurrents of sexuality and an evil-intentioned
destiny, and while both the script and performances aim for an appropriate tone,
it is the music which achieves it. The pipes have at times a sweet, almost shrieking
mischief, and at other times a brooding ominous quality which is nevertheless
no less beautiful. Arranged under them is a sombre church organ, providing a
mood of quiet and pervasive guilt beneath the quixotic and amoral prancing or
sulking of the pipes. The effect is of a sinister watcher sitting amongst us,
the audience, and yet invisible and unknown to us, lending a completely new
aspect to the nature of extra-diegetic film music which had never been attained
before the film, and has perhaps never since. Used in a story which places Victorian
morality and frailty in an unknown and infinitely incongruous landscape, the
pipes are both unsettling and seductive.
The first half of the film also contains other pieces of music. The first is
a Bach partita played on a piano, and underscores the girls’ carriage journey
from their remote school through a small country town and across extensive flat
plains to the distantly awaiting rock. On the surface a bright and dainty piece
of many light notes, the chords these notes would form if played simultaneously
would convey a quality of uncertainty. This transitional piece serves temporarily
to lighten the tone of the story and expresses some of the optimistic excitement
and temporary expectant liberation of the girls. However, the opening of the
gate to the picnic ground disturbs a flock of shrieking rainbow lorrikeets,
creating one of the most memorable musical moments in the film. Wildly streaking
images of the birds’ blurred colour are double-exposed with the dreamy
face of a muse-like girl staring at them in a kind of blank, semi-desirious
apprehension, and contrary to conventional expectation, the music does not echo
the speed and wildness of the birds, but enters in a ponderous, sinister and
quiet brooding of panpipes.
As the picnic elapses, tiny seeds of summer madness begin to take the spirits
of the girls, seemingly under the magnetic or magical influence of the rock
looming above them: a schoolmistress makes disturbing observations of the subterranean
power which must have created the Hanging Rock, hints of lesbian flirtation
have surfaced, and pocket-watches have strangely ‘stopped at twelve’.
While others fall into a post-meal nap, four girls decide to climb to the top
of the rock, and their ascent is accompanied by one of only a few pieces especially
written for the film (by Bruce Smeaton): a fugue-like contemporary piano piece
over sinisterly soaring male voices, with constantly upwardly modulating key-changes.
The piece suggests a predestined, hypnotic and in a way glorious doom, flavoured
with a lost and melancholy youthfulness.
While most of the film’s music is extra-diegetic, there is a blurred line
between the score and the rest of the sound-track which occasionally implies
a diegetic approach. I’m referring to the use of ‘atmospheres’,
a technique taken to eventual extremes by David Lynch. In Picnic at Hanging
Rock, cicadas scream almost continually before the disappearance, and from
the opening moments, various ominous, atmospheric rumbles accompany shots of
the sinisterly shaped Hanging Rock. They personify or animate the rock, rendering
it brooding and monstrous, and sit halfway between sound-effect and music. Mood-wise,
they seem to express the imminent retaliative power of a sexuality repressed
so deeply that its magnitude has been forgotten. They intrude, notably, when
the music is absent, reminding us unconsciously that this music, albeit unsettling,
has been a kind of ‘comfort zone’, soothing away the fear which constantly
lurks invisible beneath. To this extent these atmospheres perform the function
of diegetic music, and are eventually integrated totally with the music in a
diegetic/extra-diegetic convergence in the nightmarish mid-film ‘climax’,
at the point of the disappearance, when a hysterical girl runs screaming through
the trees and the rock's rumbling sighs rise to a roar.
The second (and last) act contains the only overtly diegetic music: a movement
from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Machtmusik followed by God Save the
Queen played by a string quartet at a garden party. A melancholy irony—
such stubborn, musty daintiness in an Australian summer— is the effect.
Thereafter, with the physical (and therefore potentially sexual) presence of
the girls withdrawn, the story concentrates largely on the fixation of a young
visiting Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert, on the most ethereal and evidently
psychic of the vanished girls, Miranda. The slow movement of Beethoven’s
5th Piano Concerto now enters the score as a theme for Miranda’s spirit
(often under lyrical shots of a swan which hint at her re-incarnation) and plays
out the rest of the narrative, occasionally unsettled by sporadic reprising
of the panpipes. The flavour of the piece’s gentle chords is of a poignant,
elegant, feminine grandeur, and its pensive musical sweetness seems to stroke
both the heart and the spirit. In the film it expresses a romantic longing for
the impossible, taking the audience and the characters from a state of traumatic
yearning through to a philosophical acceptance of the unanswerable, ultimately
becoming a soft anthem to the sad beauty of memory.
A verse from Edgar Allan Poe,“What we see and what we seem are but a dream,
a dream within a dream”, are spoken in voice-over by Miranda as the opening
words to the film, which itself evolves from idyll to nightmare and back again.
The filmmakers’ intuitive approach to the score was in harmony with the
content and intent of this dreamy paeon to mystery, and created possibly the
most powerful score in any Australian film.
Bibliography:
Peter Weir: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, film.
Claudia Gorbman:“Unheard Melodies— Narrative Film Music”.
Roy M. Pendergast: “Film Music— A Neglected Art”.
Cliff Green: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, screenplay.
Joan Lindsay: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, novel.
Personal scrapbook of press clippings and film reviews from the era.