Product Details

• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Water Bearer Films,
• VHS Release Date: August 10, 1999
• Run Time: 70 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6305537437
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #546,610 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

"This is not a proper documentary. The project is not about a chronology of Huxley's life, but about his ideas," informs the narrator. No kidding. Director Oliver Hockenhull tackles a career of Aldous Huxley's thoughts on society, technology, and the complex relationship between the two, from his landmark 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World to his observations on his experiments with mind-altering substances in the late 1950s, and reconsiders them in the context of modern life. Woven through the snippets of a Huxley interview from 1957 are comments by U.N. advisor Dr. Jean Houston from a 1994 Huxley Symposium, dramatic skits (designed to explore ideas of communication, language, and identity), computer graphics, and a narrator whose remarks continue to reframe both the message and medium. It's a complex, dense cinematic essay, not always completely successful in explicating points and too brief to really expand the investigation, but a thoughtful and inspired attempt to grapple with intellectual ideas in a social context. Viewers looking for background on the work of the famous novelist, essayist, and social philosopher won't find much in the way of biographical information, but this meditative, self-reflexive look into his theories and thought is a fascinating approach to Huxley's work. --Sean Axmaker

Pacific Cinematheque Program Notes, 1997

"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."

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Huxley's multimedia showing is fun and provocative, December 15, 1999

By 

jamie young (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Aldous Huxley-Gravity of Light [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I liked the film, makes me want to read the guy. Also, I liked hearing about his brush with the social revolution of the 60's. I was born in 1970 but the kids today are keeping the new age ideals alive albeit in a distanced way. They know they didn't discover it so it's like a museum piece once the hedonism is spent. There's no feeling of "This will create the utopian paradise." But Huxley invented it and discovered it. Of course, he, like the rest, believed. And learning more about him, as this film lets you do, will be using a time machine to experience the wonderful time before the revolution is "proved" useless. The trick is to take that experience into the present and discover where we haven't been proven wrong, yet. This age is so cynical, and Huxley, even at the end of his life, was not. Seeing this film brings that man to you, without having to experience just the talking head that his interviews show. The filmmaker opens up, ala Errol Morris, a world of ideas through imagery presented along with the subject. He does it very well.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a very loose interpretation, April 26, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Aldous Huxley-Gravity of Light [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This film is very hard to comprehend. If your looking for some live interviews and some interesting background into Aldous Huxley's life, this ain't for you. It does give you glimpses of interviews (all combined probably- 5 min)but it's soon interrupted with a bad combination of hard to follow commentary and dull visuals(no offense). Is not worth money.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Huxley would have hated this video, July 2, 2002

By 

Exjay (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Aldous Huxley-Gravity of Light [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The reason to buy this is for the archival footage of Huxley. The "documentary" itself is little more than pretentious, self-indulgent pap. If one can forgive the filmmaker's interruption of Huxley's televised dialogues--to provide a counterpoint with his own life, his own failed relationships, his own family connections to the Huxley name, etc.--one cannot forgive the blatant misunderstanding of the message of _Brave New World_ evidenced by the production values (at one point, distracting digitized images are incorporated into the archival footage as Huxley talks; at other points, the film's background music almost drowns out his speech). One scene consists of Huxley's barely audible voice coming through a cell phone on a table while ice cream cones melt on a table.

Not only is the film overlong and poorly made, its attempt to make Huxley "entertaining" is just another way of giving the public the "bread and circuses" that he warned against.