The Sublime & The Beautiful

In Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, there is a great distinction made between that which is sublime and that which is beautiful. Burke's view of beauty is very specific, and mostly includes things possessing a variety of attributes: small, light colors and hues, and makes us feel a desire to preserve it, to love it. The sublime, for Burke, is rather the opposite: of large scale, darkness and shadow, and causes within us a desire to preserve ourselves: fear, in other words. His philosophy is a causal structure, and the purpose of the artist is to cause such effects in its viewers as to bring forth delight, wether it be a sublime delight, or a beautiful one. All of Burke's ideas are reduced to particles, and do not venture beyond the epistemological.

For Burke, there can possibly be no mixing of both the sublime and beautiful which would result in greatness: it would only produce 'the ridiculous', or 'the odious'. On paper, his theory seems very fluid and to hold much validity in the ways of art. When viewing a truly sublime work, we see that Burke's description is very true, and we are delightfully terrified. Upon beholding an object of beauty, we feel the need to preserve it. However, it is in the mixing of the two were Burke has failed to see the possibilities for great art to arise.


Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock is a film that dares to tread between the two. Set in the Victorian-ruled Australian Outback, it tells the story of a girl's school's outing on St. Valentine's Day to an ancient rock formation in the Australian bush known as Hanging Rock. Decorated with tiny details of feminine Victorian imagery, the life and aura of the girls school is contrasted greatly by the looming presence of the volcanic formation and the wild, natrual environment they find themselves in.




Intrigued by the rock, a few of the girls decide to explore, little to their knowledge that they will never return. After they do not return, the headmistress decides to investigate for herself, but she, too, goes missing. The remaining party returns to the school in a state of distress, where the mysterious disappearance soon causes widespread panic throughout the town. With each day, pieces of the mystery are slowly uncovered, but only leads to further questions, which are never answered. The film is a mystery within a mystery, and remains as such, never resolving itself. Aside from the presence of the rock, there is nothing remotely scary in the film, and it is the presence of the mystery from which we derive sublime delight. The panic of the missing girls is filmed against fine decorated and beautiful scenery, which not only please the eye, but highlight the tragedy of the disappearance. The film is a triumph in all forms: visually stunning, subtle yet evocative, and one of the most haunting I've ever seen. The balance of such opposites is the work of a master filmmaker.


It is the emphasis on mystery which makes Picnic At Hanging Rock so appealling. The film shows us everything, but explains nothing. The emphasis on the metaphysical aspects of the natural world is a constant source of wonder. The beauty of Miranda, of the girls who disappears, is attributed to that of an angel, while Hanging Rock remains an alluring and ominous natural phenomena. We know the origin or source of neither, only that it must be something beyond our own knowledge. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote:

But never yet the man was found
Who could the mystery expound,
Though Adam, born when oaks were young,
Endured, the Bible says, as long;
But when at last the patriarch died
The Gordian noose was still untied.
He left, though goodly centuries old,
Meek Nature's secret still untold.

The groundskeeper at Hanging Rock has seen every cast member from the film return to the site, quietly and unnanonced, still drawn to the mystery of the rock.