Documentary shines light on life, struggles of Flannery O’Connor
It’s so appropriate to find that a Jesuit priest co-direct “Flannery,” a documentary about Flannery O’Connor, one of America’s greatest if still controversial writers.
But that’s the case with Fr. Mark Bosco, who with codirector Elizabeth Coffman combines intellectual appreciation, remarkable animation, vintage interviews and photos to bring to vivid life the times and struggles of the gifted Southern and very Catholic novelist, essayist and short story writer who was 39 when she died Aug. 3, 1964, of lupus, the same autoimmune disease that had killed her father.
“I was always drawn to her work. I think because I’m Catholic,” Bosco said last week. “She has this strange aesthetic of violence and this strange Gothic sensibility.
“I was already trying to write a book about her when in 2008 I came across about 12 interviews that were done I guess around the late 1990s. They were interviews with all of Flannery O’Connor’s friends and were still alive.
“Right away we could see in 17 hours of film there was a documentary here to be started.”
“As Tommy Lee Jones says in the film, she’s one of best writers of 20th century and I have to agree,” Coffman said.
O’Connor is known for “Wise Blood,” which John Huston adapted for a film, and short story collections like “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”
“She’s one of the best modernists in a way,” Coffman said. “She has a documentarian, a reporting sensibility about the voices and the attitudes and the behaviors of the South of that era. Her storytelling unravels, critically, those (racial) tensions that were happening post-World War II in the South.
“She has a dark sense of humor, the Gothic sensibility. She’s not sentimental at all! She lays it on the line. We were lucky to be the first filmmaking team to get total rights to use her stories and letters to tell her story.”
Bosco sees O’Connor’s Catholicism as crucial to her writing. “She offers a concrete situation of what it means to be a human being. She has these violent transcendent moments,” he said.
“Readers are always taken on a journey with her. I really do believe her philosophical, theological readings testify to her deep faith. ‘Everything I write is,’ to use a Jesuit term, ‘for the greater glory and honor of God. My art has to do justice to the gift that I’ve been given.’
“Her lupus,” he added, “really kept her almost quarantined at her farm in Milledgeville (Ga.).
“Her disability helps her make a decision: I only have so much to give, I don’t know how long I have to live. My life must be my vocation to write.”
“Flannery” will screen Friday at virtual cinemas, including Wellfleet Preservation Hall.