Picnic at Hanging Rock

Aesthetics professor Rogers rigorous monograph uses feminist Freudian and post-colonial tools to unpick Picnics alluring push-pull of ambiguity/ suggestion, showing how it encourages keen viewers to question the films mediated images of femininity. Between the surfaces and secrets, she finds something subversive: a story about the horror of living under an imposed narrative. -- Kevin Harley * Total Film * The BFI Film Classics are a perfect way to explore a film such as this, and Rogers monograph is another essential entry in the series. -- Adrian Smith * Cinema Retro * Backman Rogers has produced a beautifully constructed analysis of this complex, visually haunting film as she leads the reader through aspects of its background, musical score, casting, shooting and marketing. * The Irish Scene * Such an attentive, impassioned awareness of the politics which underscore the figuration of the girl on screen not only offers up a provocative re-reading of a classic film, but it also speaks directly to its gestures of love, of kinship and pleasure which operate outside, and in spite of, patriarchal culture. This is a beautiful book of relevance to any and all interested in the expanding vistas of female subjectivity in film and those real and metaphorical 'rocks' which might lodge, vociferously, between such positions of imagination, selfhood and desire. -- Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University, UK A beautifully constructed analysis of a complex and haunting film. Backman Rogers skillfully dissects the patriarchal working environment of Patricia Lovells project to realize a faithful rendering of Joan Lindsays perplexing novel while also offering a subtle reading of the film via its distinctive cinematography. A tour de force of feminist film analysis, intellectual clarity and cinephilia. -- Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds, UK This is a ravishing book. Anna Backman Rogers passionately honours the enchantment of Picnic at Hanging Rock, its veiled images, the love between Miranda and Sarah, its languor, the slow bleed from morning into afternoon. Yet she also, in coruscating prose, shows quite brilliantly how the film decries the horror of empire and the violence wrought on the female body, then and now. I urge you to read this book, to enter its dream. -- Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge, UK

Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis-Image (2015), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019), and Still Life: Notes on Barbara Lodens Wanda (2020). She is also the co-editor of three books on feminism and visual culture with Laura Mulvey and Boel Ulfsdotter. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture.

Acknowledgments 1 Within a Dream: Origins, Production and Filming 2 Waiting a Million Years Just for Us: Artistic Influences and Uncanny Spaces 3 Quite Intact: The Male Imaginary and Courtly Love Conclusion: Girls on the Verge; Femininity and Hysteria Notes Credits