Recently I saw Diane Keaton’s documentary Heaven for the first time in about twenty years. The film uses numerous clips from old black-and-white films to illustrate what interviewees say. Some of the films sampled are extremely obscure, and I should like very much to identify some of them.
I am intrigued by these clips in particular:
1.) A sequence in which a man falls into an enclosure filled with circus lions and is mauled.
2.) A sequence in which a crowd of black men who appear to be at some kind of Shriners-type meeting stare silently in awe at terror just to the side of the camera.
3.) A sequence showing a pendulum clock mounted to a diorama of the continental 48 states.
4.) A sequence showing several barren-looking planets or moons suspended in space. The camera zooms in so one of the planets seems to smash up against the screen.
I have it in mind that the last two scenes I described above may be from an old Sunday School film or something similar. The first two scenes definitely look as though they are from lower budget 1930s films.
As I mentioned, I last saw the movie Heaven about twenty years ago. There is a sequence I remember from that earlier viewing which left a vivid impression on me, but it is not in the version of the movie that is now available on YouTube. It showed a man running frantically down a corridor towards the camera as he is pursued by a lion. Does anyone know of an old movie with a scene such as this? Could it be that this scene appears in some versions of Heaven but not others?