SHEEN TALKS: FLANNERY

hello and welcome to the sheen center online i'm david deserto interim executive director and the archbishop fulton j sheen center for thought and culture is the art center of the archdiocese of new york and today's conversation is part of our ongoing free public content that we're offering while we can't gather together in person down at the sheen center if you haven't already done so please like us subscribe to our youtube sheen talks channel and go ahead and click that bell icon so you can be notified of future videos we also encourage you during these uh challenging times if you're able to consider making a donation to the sheen center and we're happy to announce that from now through thanksgiving uh part of our donations will be contributed to the food banks of catholic charities now as many of you know uh we've been honored to be able to host a virtual two-week run of the remarkable new documentary flannery which explores the life and legacy of the iconic southern catholic writer flannery o'connor uh i assume that you've either watched the movie already or plan on watching the movie but if you haven't it will be available on our sheen center website that's sheencenter.org and it will be available from now through october 15th so again if you haven't seen it really encourage you to watch it it's a terrific documentary um so before we go ahead and introduce today's a special guest why don't we take a look at the trailer one critic called her perhaps the most naturally gifted of american novelists flannery o'connor a good man is hard to find wise blood mystery and manners everything that rises must convict you she's one of the best writers of the 20th century i've read everything that she's written flannery o'connor is one of the writers least afraid to look at the darkness we've had an accident the children screamed in a frenzy of delight but nobody's killed june star said with this apartment you think it's this bitter old alcoholic who's writing these really funny dark stories and then you find out she's a woman and that she's devoutly religious khan was born in savannah georgia into an irish catholic community you get someone who's writing out of a specific time specific set of manners what she found was mystery i think that a serious fiction writer describes an action only in order to reveal a mystery how is she going to find the stories that she knows she needs to tell and how is she going to tell them [Applause] i do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of god it's unbelievable she was so sick she never stopped writing it was the illness that made her the writer that she is i feel that the grotesque's quality of my own work is intensified by the fact that i'm a southern and a catholic writer she's really funny she's often funny in a very dire way she ignored the disapproval of her religion she ignored the disapproval of her fiction she just saw the mystery of the [Music] craziness well we are doubly blessed today to have the two co-creators of this film uh co-directors elizabeth kaufman and father mark bosco and before i invite them on to join us let me tell you a little bit about them elizabeth has produced and directed films about communities in crisis from louisiana to bosnia uh and like with this documentary many many of our other films include or are about writers such as one more mile with writer alexander heman veins in the gulf with martha surpass and souls and sonnets with rita dove uh father mark bosco sj is a jesuit priest and a professor he is an authority on the works of flannery o'connor and graham greene his most recent book is graham green's catholic imagination published by oxford university press he is the vice president for mission and ministry at georgetown university uh and flattery is his first film project welcome elizabeth and father mark thank you nice to be with you oh no we're so so excited to talk with you um i absolutely love this film uh partly because i am you know among like those people in the uh trailer a long time fan of flannery o'connor uh and i've got a lot to unpack here but before we do first of all just congratulations i mean the the first library of congress ken burns award that's that's pretty impressive so congratulations on that and uh before we jump into a lot of the stuff that we can unpack about flannery the writer the crafts um and all those things let's just ask a simple question and i offer it really to the both of you uh what drew you to flannery o'connor and what really made you feel compelled uh to make this documentary about her so maybe let me start with you first sarah well i grew up in the south and i grew up wanting to be a writer i i was not traumatized as too strong a word but i was a little horrified at the history of the south following the civil war at the segregation that still exists and i found in literature a way to think through uh these conflicts and yeah i grew up in jacksonville florida just south of savannah so linking to uh flannery o'connor was was natural for me how about you father yeah you know well um i i remember reading floundercon for the first time in high school and being so puzzled by her feeling uh even back then that something great was happening but i couldn't get it i was just like it was over it was overwhelming and then of course i saw i read her in college and and as my work more and more got into the catholic literary tradition um i was drawn more and more to flannery o'connor to to write about her i was interested in how this um uh this faithful devout catholic woman uh was was really kind of um creating a new kind of modernist form of of of writing that spoke both to her faith and to the people uh in her own context and history so i think for me it was just a kind of a gradual kind of i need to do more i need to understand fellaini o'connor which really led me to to love her i'm teaching her right now at a seminar with a little over 20 georgetown students and it's just it's a fantastic experience just to go through all these stories with these students such a revelation excuse the pun i mean that's the perfect way to say yeah um and we can certainly talk about uh her you know the specific stories um elizabeth you had studied uh english literature in college and as we said in your bio many of your films are either specifically about or at least somehow include conversations with authors what is it about literary figures that intrigues you as a filmmaker well i actually have a phd from an english department and i i started out thinking oh i have to focus on faulkner and and then i went to graduate school and fell in love with film history and film studies so i shifted and did a dissertation on film history and then started to make films after that so from the very beginning all of my films that you referenced in the beginning have both writers in them and religious topics i mean the the environmental documentary i made veins in the gulf the uh the host is the poet martha serpas who is a committed catholic um the bosnia film i made after the balkan crisis uh features tensions between the catholic heritage and the muslim population on the 17th century jewish poetry history of saracopusulum uh that has rita dove in it again a tension between catholicism and judaism so i don't you know it's something about writers who the writers are able to take that deeper longer look that is so much about um spiritual and moral interests that i never started out thinking oh this is going to have a religious topic and i'm going to have a writer figure centrally um but i always wind up there because i think writers um for me anyway address these world tensions uh in a way that i identify with wow it is fascinating and you know for a film that's about a writer it's also a very visual film and hopefully we'll have time to just to get into the way that you crafted this film using various animators because i think that's such an important part of this particular film um in one of the companion conversations that you recorded uh in connection with this film and i really encourage uh anyone whether they've seen the film yet or not uh they're available i believe on youtube and there's there's i know there's at least i saw four of them i'm not sure if there's more uh that deal with different elements of flannery o'connor's legacy but in one of them elizabeth you had talked about uh similar to to father's experience how you first encountered flannery o'connery flannery o'connor um uh and and then you had i think the word you would use you would put her aside for a while but then you came back to her what was it that made you come back to her well it was father mark bosco larry o'connor uh because he um initiated this project he inherited um all these great older interviews that he was putting on a conference at the chicago where uh he used to work and we were colleagues and he knew i was a documentary filmmaker and he's like hey want to help me make a documentary film flannery o'connor and so i you know documentary films are a lot of work so i didn't jump up and down i was like sure i love flannery o'connor uh but then when i looked at these original films um that mark had uh you know i i knew pretty immediately and mark had that instinct too that uh he had some great original footage from sally uh bob through other things and and that's what brought me along because i i had an instinct that we could get an nih grant and we did and that american masters would be interested and they were and they were yeah well yes absolutely along with the animation so much of the archival footage and photos that are in this film really create such a a visual backdrop again for such a literary subject um you know father you are um an authority on flannery o'connor uh one of my favorite uh sort of little quips of flannery and she has so many it's hard to pick favorites but one of them is that she she goes i want to discover what i know and i think she tried to discover a lot in her writing for someone who knew already knew so much about flannery o'connor having studied her and taught her and written about her over the years did you discover something about her through the experience of taking this journey this filmmaking process well you know i guess i all the things that i've heard right about from either from uh from billy sessions or from another uh gene cash oh and actually being able to kind of go and um uh investigate myself so on on two levels i learned i learned about how deep her friendships were i mean i knew they were deep between the habit of being you see it but having going to actually visit eric lawn care uh in denmark before he passed uh talking to him about his relationship with finally o'connor it it just it made it such a human experience um it humanized flannery o'connor as well um going through the archives and holding the uh the the lord's um uh bath ticket that she basically had so that she could take the baths and the waters of of lourdes it was just like oh my gosh you know i mean i just been in lords myself and here we go and so it's like almost a sacramental kind of touching and and seeing things with your own eyes that um and so i in some ways it's kind of almost like a pilgrimage i felt like i was the film was a pilgrimage into a deeper sense of who she was uh her importance um gosh her her talent uh her wit um and finally just how deep her friendships are i'm not sure if if flannery o'connor was alive today i'm not sure i'd be intimidated with by her but having now seen how she she's so loyal and so dedicated to friendship um it actually uh it was a it's been a profound experience to see that wow it must have been uh you know just watching the trailer you see that in addition to just the the rank and file devoted fans of readers uh the the scope of the people that she has uh not only influenced but made admirers i mean everyone from the world of academics uh folks like you know dr cornell west to you know authors i in in one of the companion pieces it was it was really so fascinating listening to some of the conversations with authors like uh richard rodriguez and alice walker um but even you know musicians like bruce springsteen has been very public about you know the impact flannery's writings have had on his on his lyrics uh and music uh and as we saw you know celebrities like conan o'brien and i know stephen colbert and uh and others what is it or what do you think it was that uh someone who you know described herself as a as a hillbilly thomas was able to uh speak through her craft and her very distinct voice with such diverse audiences yeah do you want to take that elizabeth go ahead i'll start i know you're the hillbill hillbilly thomas guy but in terms of um her personality and her persona i mean i obsessed about a decade reading everything that she'd written and her letters and and really getting a sense of what she cared about and this respect for her you know struggling with lupus and her health issues and her ability to um from a very young age argue with publishers she just was she from a very young age she was committed to what she wanted to write and knew and had instincts about that kind of storytelling and i i gained a lot of uh respect for that i mean i think she in terms of in terms of how she represented uh people dialogue conversations i mean she would took no prisoner she was a total realist mark described her as a modernist and uh some of these things she can get in trouble for because because of the way she represents and makes jokes uh but she uh and in terms of um being a hillbilly thomas i mean let let's mark explain it that's where that's the other side of understanding her humor and uh sense of the grotesque and the and violence uh yeah i well i would say that i think people are drawn to her because she is at the top of her craft i would say that first and her craft is about the fact that she thinks that good craft good art uh says something about what it means to adequately be human and she has this 2000 year tradition that kind of gets marked by certain you know big names you know augustine or thomas aquinas but really the the catholic kind of intellectual fervor of the 19th and 20th century she's just she's chewing on existentialism and heidegger in the the french writers she's reading uh merits jacques maritan and and and consuming the kinds of ways in which tomism is being reimagined for a kind of a modernist moment how can how can this wonderful intellectual and and and really historical tradition help us be catholic and modern at the same time so this is what really what this kind of thomas neotomism did and what conor was able to do is we see that that's really an existential question of all art is is this and does this adequately represent the complexities the illusions of our that delusions that we have about life does it does it shake us up to see a more cosmic horizon and so especially after world war ii i think thomas would be kind of a a way to kind of look at the world uh we've had the trauma of the holocaust the trauma of millions and millions of deaths uh we thought we were all getting better and yet we're not i mean o'clock basically says you know we're we're always going to be imperfect we can never be perfected and her stories kind of create these moments in it so i think why are people drawn to her why are artists they get it she adequately speaks to something that's deeply deeply human in the human heart and the human head and uh she has this amazing way of staying steady as as a liberal staying focused staying directly in front of this thing or what mary gordon says in our film she shines the light in in the darkness of the human experience um and she makes us laugh at it she makes us shocked by it um but she also leaves us that kind of that moment of a kind of a surplus a surplus of feeling that there's something greater going on here so whether you're a singer whether you're a painter whether you're um whether you're a novelist or a poet you're drawn to somebody who knows how to talk about what it means to be human yeah and she's writing about kafka in her prayer journal in graduate school i mean this is where if you asked about what we learned i became really impressed by just how knowledgeable she was about uh philosophy and literature and international literature and and she's she did not want to be a regional writer southern writer um woman writer and she's not at all i mean she is very much an international a writer with international scope and wondering at this young age i mean as she's living through world war ii and the horrors around world war ii wondering um about um wondering about these cut these kafka-esque moments and how how that existential challenge what that means for religion and that's a very sophisticated modernist thought to have at her age and i think also it's and i guess this is really one of the important roles of any good artist is to take those uh you know deep profound thoughts and how do you make that accessible i guess story is a great way to do that and she did it so well that she she really was such a deep thinker and as you said she was plugged into so many of the uh the philosophical conversation and theological conversations not only of her day but of you know the previous 2000 years and she was able to really distill it into a way through her stories that that made it accessible to a much wider audience i mean we could talk later on about specific examples but i mean the ending of revelation is you know an eschatological you know uh uh thesis almost of sorts but it's in a way that you know even someone who does not have all that training can understand very complex thoughts in a way that's very compelling um yes she's she mentioned i mean revelation it's the purgatorial sense that we have to be purged of something she's she's reading saint catherine of genoa at this time this huge thick book on purgatory um and she makes a story that basically uses all the kinds of the backdrop of what what what what christians believe about a purging of of the souls purging of everything and it's done it really as a way to talk about race class in in the south so putting those two things together wow amazing yeah they're almost modern parables of sorts i mean they're really they're taking the the stuff that people knew around them and and having these very deep conversations um another catholic author that uh one of my favorites j.r tolkien a very different type of writer was not a fan himself of literary biographies uh he was speaking specifically of written biographies uh because what he felt was that often in in writing these biographies they they get so caught up in what he called the insignificant facts usually the more salacious or controversial things that they don't really address or get to the heart of the deeper truth of the person or the artist he uses an example of that um you know beethoven may have uh cheated his publisher but that really has nothing to do with the grandeur of his music right um so as you were sort of sketching out and trying to create this road map for how you would explore flannery her writings her legacy how did you approach telling the story of flattery uh and and try to sort of uh sift what you you know what you would want to talk about as opposed to what you felt were and insignificant facts well let me go first because it's going to speak most of this obviously the the one i said to elizabeth we have to tell her story because she's got an interesting life right she does it we have to tell the story in terms of her being a catholic uh being a woman in a man's world of publishing uh a southerner and a woman uh suffering from lupus and i said okay okay elizabeth don't do it which valjey could tell you a little bit about how difficult that was well david and in terms of what you asked i really i don't respond to literary biographies that or films i'm going to keep it in the film category that don't include some of the authors writing i mean i think the author's writing and in the case of flannery o'connor too seeing that juxtaposition of okay here's the person she was shy conservative she went to mass every morning and really she stayed in her room and wrote that's what she did um but let's see what she was thinking and what she was writing about so from the very beginning and we were fortunate to have the first rights to adapt both her life story uh as well as make use of uh her short stories um and so that's that's part of what started including and uh illustrating uh several of her short stories and the second part is uh there's not much footage of o'connor there's some photographs not a whole lot that get reproduced over and over and then there's one short interview of her that's that's in the documentary and that's it so we really had to be creative about all right if we want to make a feature what are we going to look at this entire time since we did not have a lot of archival footage to draw from so that's where because o'connor was a cartoonist and painted throughout her life doing hiring um we had three great female animators and uh male friend who did motion graphics with the animation uh hiring um these animators made a lot of sense and they all totally fell in love with flannery o'connor if they didn't know her already and um did did the work in the film yeah the animation i'm glad you brought that up because it adds so much to this you know her very compelling story but they're all very distinct styles of animation but at the same time they work so well together to to you know in the in the finished product um in her essay i believe it was the novelist and the believer uh she writes that the catholic novelist doesn't have to be a saint doesn't even have to be catholic but does unfortunately need to be a novelist so we've touched on this a little bit but what in your estimation specifically just from the craft of writing makes flannery o'connor such a good novelist or short story writer um okay i'll i'll go first on that um i think i think first of all uh she she she she writes that after really standing on the shoulders of jacques mariton's art and scholasticism where he says listen if you want to be if you want to be a good writer be a good writer if you want to be a good christian to be a good christian these two things are not going to fold into each other as a kind of like um a pedantic or kind of um devotional thing art is itself is its own knowledge so give yourself over to the to the knowledge of your craft so i say that because i think o'connor spent if you read her uh journals she's struggling with what kind of writer does she want to be right in the in the prayer journal and in uh metaphysics uh mathematics rather she says you know basically make me a good writer and by good writer doing it for the right reasons and so she really is aware that it's her ego cannot get in the way and so one of the things i love about o'connor's writing is the way that she is so present in the sense that she's dramatizing all this nariness but at the same time she's she's not she's not she's got this ability to let the story tell itself to go where the story goes this is really true of her short stories but even of her novels so i think what she said to be a good novelist work your craft be someone who understands and gets help her work with caroline gordon the great catholic critic you know convert get get advice um try to give a concrete particular story that can have universal significance um and so that idea of always finding the concrete particularity of life especially for her for her that meant the incarnation that meant you know that meant jesus christ who could in his very being hold together my concrete existence because of humanity and the existence of the divine so for her all art is a sacramental experience a sacramental imagination and an artist are drawn to that because art is sacramental and so i think that that's why she's such a great artist so being catholic was was was obviously part of her life but for her um it was about a fact that be a good catholic and you'll be a good artist but the two of these things are not kind of like woven that way they're kind of supporting each other yeah i think i think she said at one point that art only transcends its limitations when it stays within them and i think she was trying to stay within it and then hopefully uh you know it would speak on a much deeper level um one of the things i i also mean there's lots of things i love about the film but it doesn't sidestep um the complexities of flannery o'connor's life and writings you know including even things that might be uncomfortable even problematic uh about them including her treatment of race in both her obviously her public and her private writings um and that's obviously come to the fore in in recent months um and uh most notably um was because of a high-profile article in the new yorker uh and then there was um a uh a controversy to catholic college where her name was taken off one of the campus buildings um obviously she has her passionate defenders and her passionate critics um you know having dived so deeply into her life and spence you know so accompanied her through her writings in the process of this film um what are your thoughts about you know her legacy in light of the present moment we're in i think reading her work makes a lot of sense right now and and knowing flannery o'connor's uh personality the way we've gotten to know it uh i don't think she would be too concerned about these other things being said about her um if you read her fiction and read her letters more closely perhaps you really get a sense of what her commitment was i mean starting at iowa she was talking to her priest and this is the biographer brad gooch is in our film she was talking to her priest about writing about race and sex and being concerned about these issues but from the very beginning she was focused on the tension uh between in in the south uh around race um around sex around disability and around religion and she i won't say she prioritized one over the other but let's just say from the very beginning she was thinking through these issues of race uh so i mean o'connor her work is so strong and so good that it will outlive any other concerns and the people uh certainly how we approached from a documentary point of view uh we let we tried to let the work speak for itself including her personal letters yeah if i i would i i totally agree with elizabeth and i i would only add that um to to be teaching finally o'connor right now in a in a in the context of today the 20th century even when we were doing our film black lives matter kind of you know rages upon the the the cultural moment uh while we're still putting it together there's there was a sense that um o'connor is so very very important to the conversation on race today she is a uh she's somebody who was having to learn and to become awoke herself to the kinds of a sub white privilege and assumptions of what it meant to be a white person in the south uh her stories continually kind of interrogate that that assumption that she herself knew she lived sometimes you know with with great consciousness sometimes completely unconsciously so i think that her stories are great because re they actually lead us to especially people who are are white right who live with that sense of privilege to remember the fact that this is part of of of their reality that they we assumed too much and that our assumptions actually hurt others so i think that in some ways o'connor is part of our our conversation today uh i think was a i think that that article was unfortunate only because it didn't kind of it couldn't really give a a deep uh and i think ultimately accurate perspective on it um it raised some issues but i think that if you read flat as elizabeth says if you get into finally o'connor and you read and you go through her lives you see the journey of someone learning how not to be racist the journey of someone how using art to interrogate herself is it in an artistic imaginative way of what that would look like especially for the properties of our own experience which was deeply you know deep south uh jim crow south still kind of just being dismantled and so she's playing with those things and trying to come again to that question what is the what is the most human response to this which for her is is a response that ultimately is um focused on faith yeah and we're certainly going to get to that next because i think that is such a an important part of who she was [Music] but i remember again in one of the companion videos i believe it was richard rodriguez who said that you know she wasn't really concerned about good and bad she was really focused on salvation even at her own she was trying to work out through her writing you know salvation of others but even her own salvation she was wrestling with that and it reminded me of uh i believe it was a solzhenitsin who said that the line between good and evil runs right through the heart of every person and i think she was really trying to struggle with that in her writings and as you said uh when you read her you see that uh inner struggle through through her written word um okay so let's you know going back to what tolkien had said about insignificant facts the end of that of that quote also talks about that there are significant facts and he said the significant fact in his writing uh was the fact that he was a believer and specifically catholic you could say the same thing about flannery o'connor um and uh t.s eliot had written once about dante saying you cannot afford to ignore his dante's philosophical and theological belief or skip over those passages which express them most clearly even if you do not believe them yourself so can we truly understand flannery o'connor her writing who she was without understanding flannery o'connor the catholic again even if we don't necessarily share those beliefs and what you know people at an art center people ask us all the time you know what how do you define catholic art what makes catholic art it's really one of the central questions that we wrestle with all the time so i'll turn it to you and say you know what makes flannery o'connor a catholic novelist because i know she might have bristled that notion herself um what in your estimation made her a catholic writer i think i'd say first of all just a gift one of the things that was really great about working on the film is that elizabeth my colleague uh is not catholic and so the conversations about how to how to portray and how to narrate how important catholicism was was always done with this dialogue with elizabeth who was always trying to say what how can we get uh how can we get the most understanding of this for the largest audience a catholic and a non-catholic audience so i you know kudos to elizabeth to kind of make sure that we play we we focused on it but but she brought her own uh perspectives and her sense of you know being a christian uh race christian but not catholic to the to the conversation so that being said um i would say that to to understand flannel o'connor without without understanding her catholic faith is to understand her as an existentialist uh an existentialist writer uh who seems a little bit more snarky a little bit more um a little bit more depressing a little bit more difficult and hard because it's actually uh it's she she it's her faith it's her catholic faith that kind of was the aesthetic strategy you might say for all the violence for all the grotesquery it was there to kind of shake up and kind of open a new way of seeing the moment in the story the insight into the character or the reader's own kind of visceral experience so um i think that her catholicism is the most humanizing thing to be honest with you for me because otherwise she's just an existentialist which is okay right she is interested in in being in the existence of the human person um but she sees that as a as a religious experience she sees that as ultimately a religious journey uh she sees this as a journey into suffering understanding suffering uh and a kind of a purging of all of those assumptions that make us proud and make us think that we're better than anybody else um and really shake us up so i think one of my students once said you know uh i think if you didn't have you had no clue that flannel connor was captain you didn't know anything about catholicism you could enjoy your stories but it's like it's like only having the whipped cream of a of a banana split i think that was his metaphor that you missed the banana the ice cream and everything else that goes with it because there's something underneath all that that's kind of making that whipped cream so tasty so i kind of like to use that metaphor sometimes when i'm talking to people about why why catholicism i think is an important uh foundation to it i i look maybe elizabeth has a different perspective but she really helped to to make sure that we balance that out with how do we have the largest community understanding this tradition in her work oh yes i actually was raised presbyterian i have a sister who's presbyterian minister i have another sister who's uh who's catholic and is married to alan tate's son so my family has a lot of really interesting conversations uh about protestants and catholics around the table plus we have some jewish genetic history too so um you know from the beginning my family has been very interested in sort of theological kinds of history as well as great storytelling and writing novels and literature so yeah i don't know that i i always will fight a bit uh sort of the claiming of the catholic literary heritage is really you get her better if you're a catholic and i'll always kind of reject that so this is the tension this is the creative tension that mark and i have right that i think she absolutely is a great writer who uh was interested in judaism as well as anti-semitism and um you know she she knew those tensions because as we're describing a little about about racist comments and or things she had made including an anti-semitic comment when she was 17. she was able to write and think about these things because she understood those emotions and and finally yes i think we all come together from whatever religious background around this compelling storytelling that um for me is um is you know humanities-based and um and universal if i may i would just say that for so o'connor i would say she would she would say that she's a christian humanist right she believes and that's i think coming all the way back to um to thomas aquinas and the hillbillytomism of her experience is that um it's about a christian anthropology what what does it mean to be a human being in relationship to god i think that's her ultimate question every day she gets to the to her typewriter for in her entire life what's the ultimate relationship and sometimes it's farcical it's it's comical sometimes it's hard uh but there is a sense that uh when you can be shaken out of all the assumptions that you have about your life uh grace comes in sometimes with uh with with fire sometimes with a gun sometimes with a drowning in a river uh you know you name it uh grace will come in the most surprising places so i do think i do think she really has a christian anthropology about her uh that that creates it and that that can that can walk along with with most humanism yeah well i mean you brought up the word grace and that seems to be the thread that goes through all her writings that uh i think she had said that one of her themes was grace and the rejection of it i mean the usual rejection but grace constantly trying to break through um you know hearing you both speak and and i agree actually with both of you i mean obviously i think flannery o'connor uh can be uh appreciated and enjoyed just by by anyone and obviously it shows that she have fans she has admirers of all different backgrounds um i i would think that it's it's not that we can't preach i mean we might not be able to get all the nuances unless you have a an understanding of of her catholic faith but i think it does reveal something about her as a writer um we it reminds me of one uh speaker that we had here at the sheen center she was an art historian and she started out as a non-believer but she was just in love with uh renaissance catholic devotional paintings from the renaissance and she said as she started studying them she started studying them as a historian first and she saw how magnificent they were and appreciated them and then she started asking herself a question because she said the painters became her friends uh even though they had been dead for centuries and she said well what happens my friends actually believed what they were painting it just it helped her see their paintings through their eyes not that you couldn't appreciate them without that it just added a different i guess perspective on those paintings um now speaking about perspective i think that's where both the writer and the filmmaker uh you know share their their tools are different but their approach is somewhat similar uh you know many people have commented on flannery o'connor you know uh her fascination with whether it's violence or the the grotesque um and um you know i one i love how she says that it's it's not an artist's job to uh paraphrasing slightly here to tidy up a messy world it's just to you know write honestly and truthfully what you see you know she said her beliefs might be the light by which she sees things but that doesn't change what she sees she still sees what she sees so as a filmmaker um who dealt with all sorts of subject matters um did you take anything away or learn anything from flannery o'connor about uh trying to just through when you aim your camera's lens just to try to be as truthful as possible and not try to uh shade it in the way that you would like to portray something all the time i i think certainly i think elizabeth can speak to it more i think when especially this summer we we really had to go through our film and say we tried to deal with with racism and the dismantling of the jim crow south and o'connor's place in that is it was as honest honestly as we possibly could we tried to give everyone this opportunity to go on this journey with us the way we saw it um so i think that was one area where um there was a real sense that we were committed to to be to be as honest and clear-eyed uh from the very first moment of starting the film elizabeth well we wouldn't be on american masters if we didn't have journalistic integrity so yeah from the very beginning because i've made documentary films for you know over a couple of decades now it's absolutely you are looking for every side of the story and and trying to investigate uh the best and the worst of your subject according to the materials that are available to you so this is why it took a long time and i as the non-o'connor scholar you know threw myself into reading and researching and trying to talk to people who you know we you can't make a prp so you make a pr piece it's not going to be on pbs that's not a documentary so absolutely we we really from the questions of of race or anti-semitism or whatever you know if i was not comfortable with it if i hadn't read all these letters where she's talking about integration where she's writing about she's supporting catholic priests who are on the front lines uh during the civil civil rights uh protests in the 1960s if i really thought the comments she made about james baldwin were not because she couldn't really deal with his tv persona in 1964 which was her problem she understood he was a good writer if i thought it was because she was deep down racist i would not have made the film right i threw myself into the research and went over and over the letters and sure there are some questions we put them in the film because you can't 100 answer anything or know what was in someone's head so that's up to the viewer to finally decide uh but absolutely as mark knows i obsessed and and went through every single um uh bit of material i could and we had to with the neh you have to have outside advisors who document and confirm um and then pbs also your journalistic integrity well part of the challenge i would assume because you said you were so limited to the actual recordings of her was when you have someone who communicated to the world through written words and you wanting to bring her voice to life you needed to find someone to do that and you found someone who did that extremely well with mary steenburgen providing the voice of flannery o'connor in the film can you talk a little bit about that experience was she did she was she familiar with um flattery's writings uh you know what was that process like well i wrote her a heartfelt letter [Laughter] i mean i love her work mark also loved her work and i'm from florida and she had uh done a film on the writer marjorie cannon rawlings and so she'd already done something about a writer and that's part of what um attracted me to her and then yes absolutely um she knew o'connor's work and uh she was she was impressed with her rough cut so it was it was great she was very generous and um she's such a talent right one take and she she nailed the lines we had give her barely needed any direction yeah it was she was she really was a delight um at one point my favorite story about i don't think she'd be upset you know she's got a beautiful beautiful sultry voice and one time she was reading a line though i said oh my gosh that's too sultry for flannery o'connor and she's like oh you're right you know so it was just wonderful though but such such a pro and so talented and really really gave of her time i mean it was just incredible one of the things i i think elizabeth and i both realized is that artists so love funny o'connor that they open their doors for interviews and to help us they were interested in learning about her um they were interested in becoming part of this uh this program this this project that we did um and mary was one of those mary steve bridges was one of those well that certainly comes across i mean everyone you interview seems so passionate about her so while i'm sure it took an enormous amount of work to track everyone down when you were able to get to them it seemed like they were very willing to to talk about flannery o'connor um you know this is one of those i guess she she's so prolific and there's so many stories to choose from in addition to her other writings her letters or essays um but if you had to pick one piece do you have a favorite piece of writing i mean doing a little bit of you know rereading some of her stuff i again was drawn to her her prayer journal is so not only is it beautiful just so honest you know one point she says that you know she's in the way and she asks god to help push herself aside um what what were some of if you could pick favorite writings from flattery what would they be it depends on the interview and it depends on the day of the week i mean i'm i'm such a fan and i was just rereading her prayer journal also and and the the sense because we were doing a biography i love the sense of um of uh curiosity and her concern about her ego uh yeah i think the prayer journal and the habit of being her personal letter so her right her non-fiction her essays and mystery manners um her short stories are so fabulous uh let's see for this interview i'm going to say the displaced person well you know um i'm teaching all of lanny o'connor uh to some students right now uh so we're all the habit of being the mystery and manners uh the the two clusters of short stories and the two novels um i have to say that i uh i'm reading right now the novel that we really didn't have time to talk about the violence beared away and i read it over the weekend again for like the 20th time and how compelling and how brilliant the the the novel is we spent a lot of time with a wise blood um because we had of course the great footage from john houston's film and we can kind of explore that where we're uh there's not been as much film or our conversation about the other novel but the violent fair away is an amazing novel uh and i'm just again i was kind of blown away by by how how well crafted and how it stayed with me and made me think um if i just say a short story which is kind of what she's going to always i think she's always going to be known for i would say right now we just finished good country people and i had such a good time with that story uh with hold the joy hope well um so that that right now that's the one i would i would say is it's just extraordinary well we uh you know want to keep a track time here if i could maybe just get in a couple more quick questions um do you there's a quote i came across someone over essay's father and be curious in in getting your take on this um i believe it's from novelis and the believer and let me just read it and just see what your thoughts would be on it uh she's she's talking about um i guess being an author who's also a believer uh and and the the relationship to to modernity uh and she says i don't believe that we shall have great religious fiction again until we have that happy combination of believing artists and believing society until that time the novelists will have to do the best they can with the world they have um it's it may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things uh he has only reflected uh bro he can only uh reflect our broken condition um and this may be a modest achievement but perhaps a necessary one um can what do you think about that that maybe uh in in a in a culture that i guess would not be wrong to classify as secular that maybe for someone who wants to be a uh artist of faith that really the best contribution they can do is is just to write about the the the mystery of the broken human condition yeah i i she does that beautifully right and um and she would say that it's really it's it's the non-believers the person who thinks god is dead that is her audience that's who she thinks she's writing for uh and so there's a there's a bit of a vocation to call them into the mystery of their own life to call to question the the the reductionisms of everyone religious or not uh kind of uh live and um and move in their life uh around she so she really does want to kind of um i think her aesthetic strategy is to shake us up to make a c to make us here uh so that we can be as you mentioned in the prayer journal a little more displaced if you talk about you know what elizabeth said it was her favorite story i mean she thinks that there's a kind of you know an original displacement even jesus christ is displaced comes to become human there is a sense that that's kind of the existential reality and stop ignoring it stop trying to you know inebriate yourself to it stop trying to run from it you are a sinner yet loved you are somebody who's broken but can be with others in that brokenness you can have compassion so i i think o'conor's whole aesthetic as a catholic writer is to say if if most people don't really take the incarnation or the redemption seriously um how do i tell stories in which um redemption and the sense of my particular life uh gets gets told in such a profoundly dramatic quick almost short story kind of parable-like way yeah i think she says that uh you know we don't the world today doesn't have i think was her quote that uh does not have a sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace and i think that's what she was trying to do that idea of grace constantly working um well uh elizabeth you know you've spent so much time creating this amazing film about about flannery o'connor uh as you were in this process you know knowing uh flannery had such strong thoughts on almost every subject and when you read her letters she just has an opinion about everything did you ever think what her opinion would be about somebody making a film about her do you think she would fight you think she would be amused by that or i think she would hate it i thought she did too yeah but i mean she you know she had this ironic relationship to pop culture to television and you know i'm constantly i'm always conscious of the fact that hey our film did well in part because we had a great life story and great fiction to deal with she is the reason the film did well and i've i have not lost lost sight of that um and i i wanted to add david to your last comment and question what you're talking about with her in terms of how her stories and her life story address and her faith you know the broken human being angela o'donnell says this in our film too the brokenness of in her story temple of the holy ghost um of of an intersex an effort of this of this figure where gender is a question and that's why she's so she's so relevant today and and i i think this dealing with the questions of so-called brokenness and how she in her own life with her own experiences of disability i mean really she she helped me develop a closer relationship to god because of of her examination in her fiction i think wow wow i well we could i mean she's such a rich topic we could spend many many many hours talking about her um but i guess for the final question you know probably one of her best known lines uh is that uh you know for the hard of hearing you have to shout and for the you know the blind you have to draw large startling figures what do you hope uh this film shouts to a world that in many ways is hard of hearing yeah um i think uh david i think i i hope the film says that uh that art is a way to understand who you are an old-fashioned idea that art represents gives us ways to think about uh to go on a journey uh in our interior life and with others and that her art does it probably better than than most that her art can cause you to convert your life to christ or to something else but but you know there's very few artists maybe five or six where you read and say i might have to i'm going to change my life because of this i know i've met people who've said that i think elizabeth has two um so i i want people to be able to read her and say oh she's important she says something about our human condition that i i don't want to miss yeah part of my goal was always to have her name right up there with fault nurse when you're talking about great writers and and then to go beyond that dostoevsky why not so i absolutely i think she is a writer for today i think her life story including sort of cancel culture and how she got called out in disingenuous ways for being racist her work will outlive that um i mean i i think she it becomes its own kind of documentary story that sort of the release of the film and the story around the film and what's happening today uh just makes her even more her life story more relevant so i i think she would and i hope dearly that she would appreciate uh how seriously it's being taken oh well you know her her the word that keeps coming up in her prayer journal is gratitude yeah so um that word also has come up as i think and i've shared this last hour with you uh just gratitude to the both of you for spending this time with us gratitude for sharing this wonderful film with us so um i just want to again thank you um and uh wish you all the best on your ongoing ministry of filmmaking um and again uh to our viewers if you have not seen it yet um this film is available on our website through october 15th and it will be airing uh early next year on pbs american masters hopefully i believe you said sometime maybe during women's history month um but i guess we'll you know we'll keep checking our local listings for that um and also thank you to our viewers um i hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we enjoyed uh bringing it to you again we ask that you like us uh that you subscribe to our sheen talks youtube channel and that you go ahead and click that bell icon for future updates uh again during these challenging uh and critical times we do ask that you consider making a donation to the sheen center no gift no matter how small is uh unappreciated uh every gift makes a big difference and again we're happy to announce that uh part of our donations from now through thanksgiving uh will be shared with the food banks of catholic charities until next time stay safe be well god bless you

Channel: Sheen Talks

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Id: k3ahVF-IU3g

Length: 61min 16sec (3676 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020