The piper at Hanging Rock Gate
On Wednesday, the 14th annual series of Works In Progress Seminar Series presents an unusual paper by Saviour Catania from the University’s Centre for Communications Technology, entitled ‘The Piper at Hanging Rock Gate: Weir, Lindsay and the...
On Wednesday, the 14th annual series of Works In Progress Seminar Series presents an unusual paper by Saviour Catania from the University’s Centre for Communications Technology, entitled ‘The Piper at Hanging Rock Gate: Weir, Lindsay and the Spectrality of Nothing’.
Dr Catania’s commentary on the film classic, Picnic at Hanging Rock, should be of special interest to film critics, film enthusiasts, literary critics, and anthropologists.
His paper argues that Weir, by pivoting his film adaptation of Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock on what Merrivale calls “the invisible (or) formless Pan”, imbues Terra Incognita Australis with a (non) existent genius loci.
The result is Dreamtime spectralised – a waking nightmare that turns a Derridean screw on what Gauper terms Aboriginal “tribal timelessness” by dissolving Lindsay’s “dreadful shape” into a numinous nothingness.
For what abducts Weir’s Appleyard nymphs is an inapprehensibility that, Pied Piper-like, subsumes them into the sinister notes of its pan pipes. By transmuting Lindsay’s Miranda into reedy flute music, Weir roots her Syrinx fate in the Piper’s hoofless trail.
Miranda’s unlatching of Hanging Rock Gate unleashes her swan epiphany as her slow-motion image spectres into Dreamtime’s fluid nowhere.
The paper will be presented at the University’s Mediterranean Institute, Room 124, between 6 and 7 p.m.