In the Realms of the Unreal

Henry Darger worked as a hospital janitor in Chicago, went to the earliest mass, and spoke to almost nobody. When he died in 1973 his landlord opened the room and found a novel of fifteen thousand pages, handwritten and illustrated. The book describes a war: an uprising begun by seven sisters on a planet where children are enslaved. Darger wrote it over forty years and told no one. Jessica Yu directs. The documentary's form rests on Darger's pictures. The drawings are partly animated and the narrative proceeds over those images; the director does not hide that this is an interpretation. Very little is known about Darger. The documentary does not fill that gap; beyond what his neighbours remembered, church records and the autobiography he wrote himself, there is nothing. The question it asks is this: who is a work made for if it is shown to nobody. Darger never tried to publish and said before he died that everything should be thrown away. His pictures now hang in museums under the heading of outsider art and sell at high prices; the documentary covers that change too. What is uncomfortable is the violence and the images of children in the drawings; the film does not hide them and offers no easy explanation. Who it is for: anyone interested in outsider art, biographical documentary and unusual stories of creation. Who it is not for: the subject is strange and disturbing, the sources are limited, and the film leaves many questions unanswered.