Before Dead Poets Society, There was a More Mysterious Peter Weir

The Australian director of Master and Commander and The Truman Show, Peter Weir, rose to fame on a fixation with mystery. Though his films are not classic "mystery", suspense films, they utilize the concept of mystery and the unknown as a central element.

In his films from the 1970's (specifically Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave), Peter Weir follows the David Lynch method of experimentation wherein the film often tricks the viewer into a sense of mystery and suspense that is purely associative and emotional. In other words, there is little or no narrative basis for the suspense.

Maybe you will recall the scene from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive where the psychic-dreamer talks to the cop about his dream of meeting the devil in an alley. He walks outside and the score drowns out the street noise. The dreamer walks to the end of a building and the camera focuses on the wall. The score pulses with dark emotion. The moment is truly suspenseful. But we have only met this character two minutes ago.

He has no backstory. He has no role in the narrative of the film. David Lynch's dreamer is essentially a random guy. Despite the character's arbitrariness, Lynch's scene achieves a very taut suspense, largely because the music suggests there is something on the other side of the wall...

Peter Weir's more recent films drop the pretense of non-narrative play and focus instead on generating emotion from within the story. Where Lynch succeeded in breaking the language of film narrative into a new kind of cinematic poetry, Peter Weir ended up with something more like confessional poetry. You know its poetry. It does what poetry does. The repeated phrases of empty frames and dark music fail to become something really new. But, hey, it was worth a shot.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

A film that often feels like a made-for-television movie, Picnic at Hanging Rock tells the story of a disappearance. Three girls and a teacher in 19th century Australia get lost from their group during a picnic, at Hanging Rock. Ah-Ha!

The rock very loosely is ascribed a sinister personality as the girls remain missing for over a week.

In the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, just as in The Last Wave, Peter Weir repeatedly uses "empty" shots backed by ominous music. For instance the camera will show an image of a mountain, discussed in the film as a sort of mystical demon, and while a still image of a simple rock is presented to the viewer a dark set of piano chords plays.

The method allows Weir to imply that there is something in the shot that we are not seeing. There is a force, or perhaps a person, hidden and sinister behind the shot.

David Lynch uses the same method in many of his films. With a bass driven, darkly toned score, hitting its crescendo at a moment when we can't see anything. The mystery is anxiously implanted into the mind of the audience. Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a very good film. It's bad in fact. There is only this mystery, unnamed and not very dynamic either. On a scale of one to ten, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock would get a mere 3 out of 10 because the empty frame, mystery-building filming method is really its only (inconsistent) virtue.

The Last Wave

Scoring a full four points higher on the ten point scale, 7 out of 10, The Last Wave finds Weir beginning to abandon the non-narrative suspense elements of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The Last Wave is a slightly more conventional narrative, following the form of a suspense thriller. Peter Weir again utilizes the "sound of suspense" to create a mystical terror. In The Last Wave, unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock, the mystic terror actually makes sense. However, there are many long shots accompanied by music, implying the terror, insisting on it, so that the viewer is taken out of the story and set in a place far outside the scope of narrative cinema. This is good and bad at the same time.

Experimenting in an "experimental film" is one thing and experimenting within the structure of a "traditional film" is another. Of course, there are merits to any experimentation provided it enlarges the medium. Creativity in the context of a creative enterprise is obviously not to be shunned. As a director, Peter Weir learned to create cohesive films without sacrificing his creativity. He learned how to keep the genius section, the discrete idea, from taking away from the whole.

The story of The Last Wave concerns a city lawyer who gets caught up in the "deadly rituals" of an aboriginal tribe. It's worth watching once for the experience and power of mystical terror on film. The Last Wave is also worth watching for a point of comparison. Peter Weir is the director of some well-known, critically acclaimed and popular films. Some Peter Weir films: Master and Commander; Witness; Dead Poets Society; The Truman Show.

Stylistically, these films are not at all similar to the Peter Weir films of the 1970's. The differences are rather drastic. Watching The Last Wave back to back with Master and Commander you feel as if Steven Spielberg has turned into Woody Allen...or undergone some equally incredible transition.