WASHINGTON — It's not every day that a documentary film director
gets a congratulatory phone call from legendary filmmaker Ken Burns.
But that's what happened in mid-October for Elizabeth Coffman, an
associate professor of film and digital media at Loyola University Chicago, who
got a call from a New Hampshire area code while she was teaching class.
She texted that she was teaching and asked if she could call back
later.
Sure enough, Burns, the award-winning documentarian, wanted to
congratulate Coffman and Jesuit Father Mark Bosco, vice president for mission
and ministry at Georgetown University, for winning the Library of Congress
Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film for their 2019 film "Flannery" — about
the life and writings of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor.
Coffman and Father Bosco, former associate professor of English
and theology at Loyola, co-directed the film that won the first prize of its
kind and its accompanying $200,000 finishing grant.
The two received the award Oct. 17 at a Library of Congress gala
in Washington and in the days since they have been talking a lot about the
movie and attending film festivals with it.
Father Bosco said he has joked with fellow Jesuits that if
O'Connor is ever up for canonization, the documentary's award would count as
her "first work of miraculous grace" because it has moved
conversations about the writer to an entirely new level.
To date, the film has been shown primarily on college campuses,
but it has been getting a broader audience starting with its world premiere
Oct. 18 at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas. Days later,
it was featured at the New Orleans Film Festival and on Oct. 27 it will be
shown at the Austin Film Festival in Texas.
The 96-minute film tells O'Connor's story from interviews with
contemporary writers and artists influenced by her such as actor Tommy Lee
Jones and Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple," as well as
motion graphic animations of pieces of her work and archival footage of an
interview with the Georgia author.
O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories known not only for
their portrayals of the South but for their dark and sometimes comic imagery
that revealed the human condition, warts and all, but also wove together
Catholic themes of grace and redemption.
The "Flannery" screenings, with discussions afterward
with one or both of the directors, have prompted animated discussions,
reinforcing the directors' views that the Southern Gothic writer, who died in
1964 at age 39 from Lupus complications, still has something to say for the
current time.
"People respond with passion," Coffman said Oct. 22
from New Orleans, in between screenings.
"Really, a lot of people in the crowd in New Orleans were
asking these detailed scholarly questions," she said, adding that she
jokingly asked some of the people in the audience if they were Ph.D. graduate
students.
Coffman described the moviegoers as part of a "Flannery fan
club" and said those who feel strongly about O'Connor like nothing more
than to discuss her faith or her views on sexism and race.
If the film touches a nerve on these issues, it could be because
they were the main things the directors wanted to convey. Father Bosco, an
O'Connor expert, said he wanted the movie to give equal time to the writer's
Catholic faith, her white privilege and her sense of being a Southern person
and someone with a disability.
The film took eight years to complete, mainly because as Father
Bosco put it, he and Coffman both had day jobs.
The initial idea stemmed from a collection of archival interviews
about O'Connor that the Jesuit priest received and intended to show at a
conference. He wondered if he should develop this further, knowing that
Coffman, his colleague at Loyola, and a documentarian, "knew how to do
this in spades," he said.
They both were intrigued with the idea, but they faced some
immediate challenges. For starters, there was only one filmed interview with
O'Connor, and one short piece of her as a child (teaching a chicken to walk
backward) and not many photos. Also, the Flannery O'Connor Trust would not
allow dramatic reenactments of O'Connor's work. In the end they settled on
motion graphics to tell the stories of her works, which also pay tribute to
O'Connor's early work as a cartoonist. The directors also were able to recruit
actress Mary Steenburgen to read some of O'Connor's writings for the film.
Father Bosco had already been keeping tabs of anyone who spoke
about O'Connor's influence in interviews, including several authors, Conan
O'Brien and Bruce Springsteen.
In a statement for the film's award, Burns called it an
"extraordinary documentary that allows us to follow the creative process
of one of our country's greatest writers." He said it "provides us a
glimpse into her life, including her Catholic faith, her unusual sensitivity to
race as a Southern white woman, and her daily struggles with illness and the
prospect and reality of an early mortality."
He also expressed hope that "a new generation of readers
will rediscover the writings of Flannery O'Connor because of this film."
Father Bosco said he and Coffman were "obviously very
pleased and honored" that Burns saw something in the film and they are
happy to introduce, or re-introduce, O'Connor to viewers.
The priest said O'Connor's writing reflects that "all of reality
is a revelation of God's grace."
"Her stories are always haunted with this sense of
mystery," he added, bringing readers to a "place of
uncomfortability" where they know there is something more going on and
"are being asked to go on a journey of self-revelation."
"She says very boldly: I write because I'm a Catholic,"
but her works don't have a sense of piety or triumphalism, he added, saying she
focused more on the brokenness of society, especially in America, and even more
particularly, in the South.
Coffman, who is not Catholic, said she "absolutely
adores" O'Connor's fiction.
"As we say in the film, she was writing for people who don't
believe in God. She wasn't writing for the converts" but for people who
need to face what's in these stories.
And that's something she and Father Bosco aimed to do with the
documentary as well. With the film's national broadcast, she said, "we
were thinking of a secular crowd of belief and nonbelief, and I think the film
accomplishes that."