Weir(d) Sex: Representation of Gender-Environment Relations in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli

Abstract

Soft images of pubescent women scaling the dizzy heights of a massive phallic rock in turn-of-the-century rural Victoria, and young men matching physical prowess in the indomitable Western Australian desert as World War I rages in Europe, provide foci for two of Peter Weir's most successful early films, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). In both these films the physical landscape is simultaneously integrated with and contrasted to the passions of young men and women. The result is an aesthetic that takes the viewer beyond the immediate narrative to a place where masculinity and femininity find expression. In this paper, transactional and psychoanalytic perspectives are used to interrogate the gender images which are portrayed in both these movies, linking them to some concepts which find currency in ecofeminism. The concern is with the individual struggle between the powerful, complex, and yet less-than-rational forces that are integral to the nature of our individual beings and the rational nature of prevailing societal values that supposedly provide us with guidance. A dynamic theory of contemporary film is implicit in our discussion of “images in motion over time through space with sequence”. These elements—along with an overlay of shape, size, scale, color, sound, and light—arc the cues that provide meaning for Weir's portrayal of wo/man-in-environmcnt relations. Suggested in this paper is a broader narrative which speaks to a postmodern sexual order and its representations in social theory and contemporary cinema. Crucial questions are raised regarding the ways that cultural identity is grounded in class and gender.