Picnic at Hanging Rock ( for us Lesbians also !!! ) torrent

While not aimed at a lesbian audience, Peter Weir's classic 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock to a great extent certainly is ABOUT lesbians. The all-girl school around the previous turn of the century (1900) is full of passionate, longing and loving girls who express their love for each other in poems, glances and in adoration. On another level, the dean and the teachers, all women (due partly to ensure that the school's reputation is not questioned) live and work together, forced by the norms of society to suppress any feelings of love or passion for one another. This is depicted very subtly but still clearly, nevertheless.

Lesbians interested in films illustrating women's love for each other often overlook this film. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, the film is intended to please a large audience; therefore, to avoid the problems of heterosexuals not being able to identify with roles expressing lesbian love, it is not depicted graphically (and it would have been "wrong" to do so in this film, considering that the "under-cover" kind of lesbian love must be preserved in a film set in this particular cultural context), and heterosexual desire plays an important role for the turning out of events of the plot. Secondly, and probably the most important reason, is that Weir much sees these girls through the eye of a man in the sense that he uses an over-aesthetical image style when portraying them, not far from the culturally accepted heterosexual photographer David Hamilton (whose imagery of young pubertal girls is of a dubious character). But the imagery of Picnic is by far not as 'tastelessly tasty' as that and without debate very beautiful. And we see that some girls do love girls (as if people would need more proof of that). Being a classic, you may have seen it many times before. If you have not, now is definitely the time!

This is the 1998 director's cut of the film. It is now in widescreen and both sound and picture have been digitally restored but it has one severe drawback; the director himself has shortened it by 8 minutes, so we actually get a little less of flirtatious gestures than people who saw it in the seventies did. : (

Picnic at Hanging Rock was Australian director Peter Weir's international breakthrough. It won him fame, fans and a ticket to Hollywood where would later make Witness, Dead Poets Society, Fearless, and Master and Commander.

Trivia: The pan flutist Zamfir (not "Zamfi" as credited in the film) increased his fame tremendously after this film.
Trivia 2: The story goes the film is based on a true story. This is totally untrue.

DETAILS:
Full, uncompressed full quality dvd 5 (PAL)
Aspect ratio: 1.77:1 ; Widescreen.
Audio: Dolby Digital stereo.
Spoken language: English
No subtitles
No extras.