Diane Keaton's HEAVEN (1987) — Encore of the New Remastered Version!

Back by popular demand after its highly successful LA premiere at PRS and in celebration of what would have been the beloved actress/director/artist's 80th birthday (January 5th), 7th House is proud to present a very special encore presentation of the newly remastered version of Diane Keaton’s HEAVEN (1987)! Eccentric, authentic, idiosyncratic, and utterly charming describe not only the late great Keaton (Annie Hall, Reds, Father of the Bride) but her underseen directorial debut — a delightfully bizarre documentary that probes the great beyond with oddball charm, wit, and warmth! The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the film's executive producer and distributor Arnie Holland, discussing Heaven's origins and working with Diane to make her wholly singular first film.

What do you believe happens when we die? Keaton asked that question not of theologians or scholars, but of strangers on Hollywood Boulevard — poets, preachers, children, and eccentrics (...and Don King) willing to wonder aloud. Her exhilaratingly askew directorial debut is a radiant curiosity cabinet of belief and longing. Mashing up off-kilter interviews filmed against stark 80s expressionist backdrops with expertly cherrypicked classic film fragments from Metropolis, Stairway to Heaven, The Green Pastures, and a bevy of “what-the-heck-is-that?!” obscurities, Keaton (who once joked that her own personal heaven might be in the cutting room) crafts a wild collage of celestial speculation that is by turns fascinating, funny, and utterly unique.

An avowed agnostic with a child’s fascination for eternity, she turns her camera toward both the sacred and the absurd. Interviewees include a masseuse named Soorya who claims to have been has been visited by extraterrestrials, a dazzling drag queen, a longhair (who says cows are “God’s lawnmowers”) arguing with an atheist punk rocker, a bandage festooned woman, Keaton’s own disbelieving Grammy Hall, and adolescents who believe that heaven is “all white, like marshmallows” and that, sure, sex exists in heaven “but what happens? You make little dead people?”. Between the laughter and the lunacy, the film hums with yearning — for beauty, for meaning, for some reassurance that this life isn’t all there is.

“I don’t think heaven is a subject you take on,” Keaton once said. “It’s something you want.” That longing gives the film its pulse: a strangely moving blend of irony and awe. Through the juxtaposition of innocence and artifice, the celestial and the cinematic, HEAVEN becomes a kind of scrapbook of spiritual searching.

While Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven was an evident touchstone, Keaton described feeling energized by the creative charge of the moment — citing the work of David Lynch (she would go on to direct an episode of Twin Peaks three years later), David Byrne, Robert Wilson, Alex Cox, Laurie Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, and others. Yet Keaton’s ambitiously experimental directorial debut is all her own. Playful, questing, and stylistically bold, HEAVEN casts its questioning eye through a refracted lens of Hollywood fantasy and human hope. Keaton invites us to consider that perhaps paradise isn’t a destination but a state of curiosity and offers a reminder that even skepticism can shimmer with light.

Dir. Diane Keaton, 1987, 80 mins, United States, English, Unrated, Digital.

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