John C. Lilly Jr., a filmmaker and writer who explored human conscious­ness, died Nov. 17 in Zacatecas, Mexico. He was 70 years old.

John Lilly was born in St Paul, Minn., in 1937, the son of Dr. John C. Lilly and Mary Crouch Lilly. He was a member of the first class of Colorado Rocky Moun­tain School in Carbondale in 1952.

He attended George Washington Uni­versity in Washington, D.C., and did some of his first work in filmmaking with his brother, Charles, in Hollywood.

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Mr. Lilly, an ethnocinematographer, was an authority on the Huichol Indian culture of central Mexico, and was invited into their communities to experi­ence and record their traditions and way of life. Work he did with his wife, Colette, is in the permanent collection of the the Museo Arte Contemporaneo Huichol in Zacatecas. He served on the board of directors of Conservacion Humana, an organization that maintains one of the most complete archives of field notes, documents, papers, photo­graphs, audiotapes and films on Huichol culture.

Lilly had a lifelong interest in rail­roads, publishing articles extensively in Mexico and the United States on the sub­ject of light-rail transportation. The Sier­ra Club hired him in the 1980s to lecture on preserving the rail line from Glen­wood Springs to Aspen.

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Lilly is survived by his wife, Colette Lilly, of Zacatecas; his mother, Mary Lilly, of Carbondale; and an uncle, David Lilly of St. Paul. His father, Dr. John C. Lilly, and his brother, Charles Lilly, pre­ceded him in death.