Terrence Malick :: Days of Heaven
Magic-hour cinema, migrant labour, impermanence and light as presence
On St Valentine’s Day 1900, a school picnic goes out from Appleyard College to Hanging Rock. By evening three girls and a teacher have gone, and at noon every watch on the excursion stopped.
Peter Weir’s film, from Joan Lindsay’s novel, has a police inquiry, a search and a girl who comes back with nothing to tell, and none of them gets anywhere. The explanation never arrives, and the film’s power lies in how little it minds. Everyone on screen wants one, and the wanting turns into a form of anxiety that slowly undoes the college.
The stopped watches are the film’s plainest disturbance. Past, present and something far older seem to overlap at the rock, as though it were a point of interference where time accumulates in layers.
The rock itself has no need of intention in order to feel present. It stands over the picnic at a scale nothing in the college’s world prepares anyone for. On one side is Appleyard, with its discipline, its corsets and its obsessive need for order; on the other a landscape that is opaque and indifferent, and that white colonial society never learned to read, along with the Indigenous history it holds. The disappearance can be read as the failure of that order before a territory it took for empty.
The girls are suspended between childhood and adulthood, and their climb takes on the shape of an initiation, with noon light, sleep and silence as its ritual. Miranda feels more like an apparition than a character, an image always withdrawing from definition. The film suggests the place they go only through their absence.
Gheorghe Zamfir’s panpipes, particularly “Doïna: Lui Petru Unc”, move across the rock and the schoolgirls with an archaic, drifting quality. Weir spoke of the music’s “pagan” quality and of how it opposed European ideas of time, culture and civilisation, and Bruce Smeaton’s score occupies the film alongside those Romanian pieces.
What the film asks in the end is to be accepted on its own terms. Back at the college, the people who stayed behind are left with a list of questions, and the rock goes on standing where it was.
