Innocence and Inner Experience

"This volume I hope I can truthfully say has scenes and instance which no other story of usual size in the world may contain, either in fiction or reality. Things that might be comical, sad, and horrifying. Let the reader follow every event and adventure, and then he can, if he sets his mind and heart on it, take it on as if he himself was an actual participator. The author writes the scenes in this volume as if he had experienced them himself." – Henry Darger, In the Realms of the Unreal

Henry Darger was an invisible man. For most of his life Darger worked as a janitor in Chicago's Catholic hospitals, scrubbing floors and silently enduring abuse from the sharp-tongued nuns who supervised him. Although Darger may have been barely noticed by the nuns and neighbors in the various Lincoln Park-area apartments he inhabited, his mind was alive with a mythology of his own design.

Darger, who died in 1973, devised a complex imaginary world in which an epic war was fought between Good and Evil – innocent, brave children and the adults who tried to enslave them. He brought that world to life by writing a novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, that eventually grew to 15,000 pages, and illustrated it on hundreds of huge canvasses made from sheets of butcher paper glued together. He kept that world a secret until he was close to death, when his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, discovered Darger's life's work. Stunned at what they had witnessed, Nathan Lerner decided that the world had to see the invisible man.

Starting from Scratch

Henry Darger created an intricate world in which seven innocent Vivian Girls were persecuted by a group of godless, child-enslaving men.

Filmmaker Jessica Yu was similarly taken aback when she was first shown Darger's preserved apartment. Yu's amazement and sense of wonder infuses her documentary about Darger's life and art, In the Realms of the Unreal. Like Jonathan Caouette's groundbreaking, innovative autobiography Tarnation, which appeared at Sundance in 2004 alongside Realms, Yu pushed the envelope in terms of structure and technique. Yu used Darger's own words, read by actor Larry Pine, to tell his story, and cast a then 7-year-old Dakota Fanning (whom Yu describes as a real life Vivian Girl) as the film's narrator. She animated Darger's paintings, bringing his world to life the way he may have seen it, and captures the various and often contradictory perceptions of the small circle of friends that Darger had collected toward the end of his life.

The nature of Darger's work and technique make innovation practically a requirement in telling his story. "It was invention born of necessity," she says by phone from her Los Angeles home. Yu had little of the traditional biographical material a documentary filmmaker relies on – just Darger's autobiography, plus conflicting testimonies of his few living acquaintances. "No newsreels, no photos, and hardly any people who knew him – certainly no one who was close to him. I think out of limitation there's a weird freedom. Once you stop resisting it, you end up embracing this idea that you have to be more creative. And also, Darger was so inventive himself. He was so resourceful, he would just grab things from books and images, magazines ... just do whatever he could to create his own work. I sort of took a little inspiration from that." She faced a cinematic challenge of the highest order, one that would lead her on a five-year odyssey.

The only thing that Yu could be certain of was the uncertainty of Henry Darger. As the film begins, she overlays the voices of the few people who knew him against establishing shots of a crucifix suspended in air and images of his workspace. At first, the collective perception of Darger as a mystery is conveyed through the voices of his ex-neighbors, with "I don't know" being the general consensus. Pine, as Darger, introduces In the Realms of the Unreal as Yu closes in on a Darger creation: a naked girl with butterfly wings. And with a slight flap of the wings, she launches into the story of Lincoln Park's invisible outsider artist.