ABSTRACT
Picnic at Hanging Rock is Peter Weir’s stunning 1975 adaption of Joan Lindsay’s classic novel that follows the mysterious disappearance of a group of schoolgirls after a Valentine’s Day picnic in the Australian Outback. Weir’s film is lush, evocative and elliptical, as oneiric and shimmering as the sun-bleached day itself in which the girls vanish from existence. More recently, the film-maker Carol Morley has directed a similarly sensuous tale, The Falling (2014), in which a group of British girls are experiencing a wave of hysterical exhaustion, fainting during a dizzying spell of eerie contagion. Fainting, is for Morley, a manifestation of denied or displaced sexuality, inspired by ‘the explanation traditionally offered for hysterical outbreaks – particularly in late 17th-century Salem’. My chapter will consider the concordances and rich correspondences between Morley’s film and Picnic at Hanging Rock, tracing a cinematic genealogy of girlhood, of the mystical and mythic and the questions surrounding embodied experience and sensuality that both films invite, especially in relation to the thought of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray.
