Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light

"This is not a proper documentary," boasts filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull about his personal take on the life, writings and ideas of Aldous Huxley, who was best known as the author of the prescient sci-fi classic Brave New World (1932). Compared to George Orwell's totalitarian warning 1984 (1949), Huxley's novel, which suggested that future societies would be contented with their technological servitude, has turned out to be the more visionary of the two. While Huxley is on camera here--filmed during a remarkable CBC interview in 1957--Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light is absolutely mesmerizing. Whether pontificating on speed vs. humanity (Huxley suggesting that a slavish devotion to increasing the former reduces the richness of the latter), his weird concept of "bosom consciousness" (tracing periods of prominence and repression in the depiction of the female breast), or his interest in ESP, parapsychology and drugs (Huxley, suffering from cancer, went out in an LSD daze on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated), the near-blind, beatific-looking Huxley seems eerily contemporary. Unfortunately, Huxley's ideas are occasionally lost in the film school level cinematic hijinks of Hockenhull, whose idea of "not a proper documentary" includes having a black actor portray his white self (which he then explains to the audience); long--and utterly pointless--back and forth tracking shots of, say, a table full of melted ice cream cones; and risible juvenile comments, such as "progress is nothing more than technological five and dime gimmicks." Still, if you can ignore the filmmaker and concentrate on the film, Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light is not without its rewards. Recommended, with some reservations. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)