“Flannery,” a comprehensive look at the enigmatic Georgia writer who focused a gimlet eye on human nature and the changing South, will be broadcast on public television for the first time Tuesday, March 23.
The documentary film will air at 8 p.m. on PBS stations, including PBA and GPB stations in Georgia. (Check local listings.)
The documentary is the first winner of the Library of Congress/Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. It is also the first documentary to be filmed in cooperation with the Mary Flannery O’Connor Trust, which controls access to O’Connor’s writings.
The seed for the documentary was planted when filmmaker Chris O’Hare conducted a series of interviews with O’Connor scholars and friends in the late 1990s, including a priceless three-hour sit-down with O’Connor’s mentor Sally Fitzgerald.
O’Hare shared those interviews with co-directors Elizabeth Coffman, an associate professor of film and digital media at Loyola University Chicago, and Jesuit Father Mark Bosco, vice president for mission and ministry at Georgetown University.
Added to O’Hare’s material are newer interviews with memoirist Mary Karr, critic Hilton Als, novelists Alice Walker, Alice McDermott and Tobias Wolff and actor Tommy Lee Jones, among others.
The film strives to place the writer’s darkly comic short stories and novels in context, as it reconstructs the world of her childhood and young adulthood in Savannah and Milledgeville.
She was a fiercely Catholic young woman raised in the Protestant South at the dawn of the civil rights era. Hobbled by the same lupus that had killed her father, she spent her last 12 years living with her mother on a dairy and beef farm outside Milledgeville, writing steadily as her health failed.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Often typed as a dealer in grotesqueries (such as the serial killer The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”), O’Connor told friends in letters that her stories, instead, concerned revelation, that her characters encountered glimpses of grace in a fallen world. She died at age 39 having written two novels and 32 short stories.
The Trust would not allow the filmmakers to re-enact any scenes from the novels or short stories, but compromised by letting voice actors read from the books while the action was interpreted in cartoonish motion graphics.
These sequences are paired with archival footage and with clips from O’Connor’s only television interview.
Actress Mary Steenburgen serves as the voice of O’Connor. “I think the trust is pleased with the results,” said Coffman.
The film was to be screened at the 2020 Atlanta Film Festival but the virus interfered. Instead last year it was streamed online.
