Aldous Huxley
Author and screenwriter Aldous Huxley is best known for his 1932 novel 'Brave New World,' a nightmarish vision of the future. Ensconced in his recently purchased villa in the South of France, in late 1931 Huxley began work on what is now widely considered to be one of the Western canon's most important novels. Published in 1932, Brave New World marks the apogee of Huxley’s abilities as a satirist. The world it presents, however, is viewed through a much darker lens, informed by the writer’s growing anxieties about the direction of political, social and scientific progress. Brave New World is also an astonishingly prescient novel, foretelling advances in each of these areas that were as much as a half-century away.
Aldous Huxley-The Gravity of Light (2003)
A feature film essay on Aldous Huxley's cultural criticism and social prophecy in light of the new millennium. Film was created with the permission of Laura Huxley.
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 (a bit dated at this point to be honest!), speculative fictions, and selections from his essays.
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.
Doctor Jean Houston, a senior advisor to the United Nations on matters of Human Development, eloquently speaks on the immense contribution Huxley has made concerning the possible human. Special thanks to Laura Huxley and Jean Houston. "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. 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."
