Aldous Huxley: The Gravity Of Light

A feature film essay on Aldous Huxley's cultural criticism and social prophecy in light of the approaching millennium.

Narration: Dr. Jean Houston.

A contemporary reading of Huxley's oeuvre, a rendition and interpretation, inspired by an immersion into his life and thought...complex,iconoclastic, psychedelic, and historical.

Aldous Huxley: The Gravity Of Light incorporates rare archival footage, computer rendered 3D animation, speculative fictions, and selections from his essays.

"Daring and deeply personal look at the British essayist/novelist/prophet...inspired." Lee Bacchus, The Province, Vancouver.

"Endlessly fascinating. It is, in fact, a brave new work. A brave next wave.
Visually entrancing and sparklingly innovative, Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light, is a post-Godardian meeting of mind, fact and light. Huxley, the visionary, would've tripped out."
- Peter Wintonick, Co-Producer/Co-Director, "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media".

Personal in tone, the film also recalls the impact of Huxley's LSD-25 and mescaline experimentations and writings for a whole generation of youth and examines the utopianistic impulses associated with the recent Rave scene. The work reflects the aesthetics and poesis of the psychedelic state without collapsing into the tie-dye cliches that have trivialized the '60's era.

"Vancouver filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull's previous two features -Determinations (1988), and Entre La Langue Et L'Ocean (1991) - were daring, dazzling, erudite, aesthetically extravagant, politically radical works of impressive thematic and stylistic accomplishment, and marked Hockenhull as one of the most uniquely ambitious filmmakers in British Columbia. Hockenhull confirms that estimation with his latest feature, an unusual documentary that is as multi-layered, mind altering, and non-traditional as its subject matter: the great English novelist, essayist, iconoclast, social prophet, and proponent of psychedelic drugs, Aldous Huxley...The fascinating, exasperating, mescaline-rush result: a Brave New Look at the author of Brave New World - and a much needed meditative look back, as we near the end of the millennium, at one of the century's most modern thinkers."
Pacific Cinematheque Program Notes-1997

Doctor Jean Houston, a senior advisor to the United Nations on matters of Human Development, eloquently speaks on the immense contribution Huxley made concerning the possible human.

"Hockenhull's simultaneously thoughtful and carefully conceived approach to the subject has made for a kind of documentary I would not hesitate to compare with the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha in form and self-reflexivity and Derek Jarman in style and composition. He has clearly defined a number of forms with which he expresses Huxley's philosophy and thought, and successfully plays with - and off of - film forms, stylistics and audience expectations. Complex counterpoint and junctures in the formal aspects of the film are fused with a combination of self-reflexive dramatic elements and intelligent, innovative use of archival footage, as well as inspired momentsof computer-rendered 3D animation. Hockenhull's approach to this "hybrid" form of cinema manages to aggressively question our presumptions and preconceptions around the current Zeitgeist while simultaneously exploring the knowledge and impact of one of the twentieth century's greatest minds." Alex Mackenzie, Curator/Programmer, Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images.

Produced with the assistance of: The Canada Council for the Arts, The National Film Board, BC Cultural Services and Telefilm Canada. Available: 70 minute 16mm film - Digital Beta - Stereo.
Special thanks to Laura Huxley and Jean Houston.

Distribution:
Order through the net:International Sales
Film screening copies: Cinema Esperanca International
PHONE: 416.703.5000 FAX: 416.703.5002
96 Spadina Avenue, Suite 301, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 2J6, Canada

oliverh@intergate.bc.ca