In the Realms of the Unreal

This was a very impressive documentary. Although it was different from the films I generally go to see, I remained interested in Henry Darger's life throughout the whole movie. He was portrayed as quite an interesting person. As a child, he is taken to an asylum and thought to be insane. When he finally escapes this life, he becomes a janitor and later, a part of the army. His neighbors play an important role in the movie because they describe his personality and what they knew about him. It was interesting to hear each perspective. Much of what they had to say about him was the same, but some of it varied at least through word choice which I felt was significant because it revealed each of their attitudes toward who they thought he was. Henry Darger's artwork was amazing. The illustrations of the Vivian sisters provided insight into his eyes. The most impressive thing was how the lives of these girls seemed to represent his life and feelings toward it. If you are interested in learning something, I encourage you to see, "In the Realms of the Unreal."

This is a very, very strange story and even a different kind of documentary. From what I could see here, scanning the reviews, most of them were not favorable toward this.

Myself, I found it slow in the first but more and more fascinating as it went on. It's just so bizarre, it's hard to know what to think as you watch this. When it was over, I found I was glad I took a chance on this DVD and will watch it again. But - it's not a happy experience.....and it is a bit haunting.

I would just comment on a few things: 1 - I agree that, considering the subject matter and strange character (Henry Darger) whom this is about, this documentary should have been more interesting; 2 - I did not object to the artwork coming to life on occasion. It added badly-needed interest to the presentation. You never quite knew what you were going to see next, and I liked that; 3 - I enjoyed the two main voices, those of Larry Pine and Dakota Fanning. Pine voiced Darger as an adult and Fanning was the narrator and represented the Vivian Girls. Although young for this kind of role and vocabulary, Fanning is an exceptional young actress and seems to handle to everything well. Both did an outstanding job and the two complemented each other nicely, too.

4 - I disagree with those who assumed Darger had no idea the physical difference between men and women, which is why he drew penises on the little girls. Come on - how naive can you be? Everyone - even shut-ins - knows the difference, whether one is celibate his/her own life or not. People see nudity throughout their life, even in the most innocent of places such as statues in public parks, museums, galleries, almost anywhere. He knew. Lord knows why he drew what he drew but let that remain his business. 5 - The more one listens to this account, the more insane Darger appears. I wasn't totally sure of that until he went into his "weather" phase. Holy smokes, this man had problems! It's sad, in a way, and is a prime example of how much an imprint your childhood has on the rest of your life. With a "normal" childhood, with a loving mother and father, would Henry have been a "normal" adult?

Anyway, I found his book - from what Dakota and the others read from it - somewhat boring and definitely depressing, to be frank. To me, in addition to being immense adventure story it is, it was just as much - if not more - simply a long diary of man wrestling with his tortured soul.

Definitely recommended, but know what you're in for.

Henry Darger was a janitor. He lived in one room. He cleaned a Catholic hospital for fifty years, and then died with a 15,000 page manuscript and yards and yards of artwork, unknown and unpublished, in his room. You can find out more about Henry Darger and his life work, chronicling the adventures of "The Vivian Girls" at the Henry Darger entry on Wikipedia.

"In the Realms of the Unreal" is a documentary about his life. The narrative comes through a few different sources: There are interviews with those who knew of Darger in his last days, including the landlords who discovered his work. There is an old man's voice reading Darger's autobiography. There are pieces of Darger's novel. Then there is a narrator who is about 5 years old, providing a little summary and connectivity now and then. The visuals behind the readings are sometimes photos of relevant locations, like the state farm where Darger spent his late childhood, or the hospital where he worked most of his life. Sometimes they are stills or animations of Darger's artwork.

The life of Henry Darger is fascinating. It's especially intriguing to think that there are people around us who are silently, secretly living these incredibly rich and complicated internal lives. It's sad that Darger was never "discovered," but even that sadness is complicated. I'm not sure what the world would have done with him, had we known what he was about. His was not the type of art that's comfortable to package and sell. Hard to contemplate a lonely old man drawing pictures of naked children, unless you put it in the context of his whole life. Not easy to reduce to a few key words.

The movie was kind of distancing. I came away knowing more about Darger but I felt unsatisfied somehow, like some primary source had been held back, like everything had been too filtered, too disjointed. Maybe it just goes with the subject matter -- Darger was a recluse, not open to interpretation or summary. The most meaningful parts to me were the pieces read from his autobiography. It was surprisingly kind, chatty, a bit apologetic, and patient. No bitterness. No angst. Isn't that strange.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS CONTENT WHICH SOME READERS MAY FIND SEXUALLY DISTRESSING.

Henry Darger (1892-1973) remains the most startling exemplar of 'outsider art': art created by an individual who has absolutely no contact with the formal art world. Darger, a native of Chicago, suffered an extremely abusive childhood ... in which he was institutionalised in an asylum for feeble-minded children, even though he may have been of above-average intelligence. He spent almost his entire adult life as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, never earning more than $25 weekly. During these decades, he obsessively attended Mass thrice daily (four times on the Sunday) and typed a 15,000-page novel which nobody has read in its entirety. (I've read four pages of the impenetrable typescript which resides at the American Museum of Folk Art: that's all I could manage.) What has brought Darger so much posthumous attention is his artwork: obsessive drawings of little girls, brightly coloured, on long sheets of butcher's paper. Many of Darger's girls (traced from better artists' work) wear elaborate frocks. Others, drawn free-hand by Darger, have bizarre animal appendages: butterfly wings, rams' horns. Speaking of appendages: many of these little girls are naked ... and they have little-boy penises. Darger's murals and his multi-volume novel document a fantasy realm in which heroic little Christian girls are eternally at war with pagan soldiers.

Jessica Yu's documentary 'In the Realms of the Unreal' (a shortened version of the title of Darger's novel) attempts to make sense of Darger's life, art and obsessions. Darger was not precisely a recluse: he appeared in public but interacted very little. Because Yu has no footage of Darger, and only a handful of photographs of him, she resorts to re-enactments. We keep hearing a male voice-over that purports to be Darger, speaking about himself. Only in the end credits do we learn that this is an actor (Larry Pine), reading fictionalised narration scripted by Yu. The immensely talented child actress Dakota Fanning also narrates: the decision to use a little girl for this task is exactly right, and Fanning reads her material splendidly ... but Yu has written text for her which sounds improbably mature from such a young narrator.

Yu interviews a surprisingly large number of the very few people who actually knew Darger. (They disagree on how to pronounce his name.) I agree with the interviewee who theorises that Darger drew penises on his little girls because he was entirely innocent (and ignorant) of the female anatomy, and he sincerely believed that little girls' sexual equipment looked like little boys'. Many of the little girls in Darger's art (and in his novel) are tortured or brutally murdered by men in military uniforms with mortarboard hats, yet it's clear that Darger's sympathies are with the little girls. He seems to be repelled, not aroused by the violence which he fictionally inflicts on them.

I thought I knew all the weird stories about Darger, but this documentary springs a new one. Apparently, when Darger was alone in his bedsit, he was overheard through the walls by his landlords and the other boarders: having loud arguments with himself, speaking in different voices and accents, sometimes in unknown languages. It wouldn't surprise me if Darger had multiple personalities. Also, I hadn't known (until I saw this film) that Darger's imaginary world was so detailed that he kept lists of the casualties on his fictional battlefields, and financial accounts of the warfare's expenses ... both of these figures exceeded the thousands of millions!

I was intrigued to learn that the Chicago-born Darger attempted to reinvent himself as Henry Dargarus, native of Brazil (where the nuts come from). This behaviour is absolutely typical of someone who experienced long-term sexual abuse in childhood, and who desires a new identity as a means to blot out those memories.

For most of his life, Darger lived in one room of the house of Nathan Lerner, an aspiring artist in his own right who ultimately made his impact in the art world as the curator of Darger's work. Lerner's widow is interviewed here. Yu mentions that the Lerners eventually subsidised Darger's rent, but doesn't mention that they later made a fortune by auctioning many of Darger's girlscapes after his death.

Filmmaker Yu scrupulously documents Darger's obsessions. One of these was for weather patterns, specifically storms. (Darger was present when a cyclone levelled an Illinois town in 1913.) Another of his obsessions was rather odder. In 1911, a five-year-old Chicago girl named Elsie Parobek was abducted and strangled; the case remains unsolved. Darger was in Chicago at the time, age 19, and he obsessed over this girl for the rest of his life. Some Dargerphiles theorise that he may have killed her. But there is no evidence for that, and Yu's film commendably sticks to the known facts.

Was Darger a paedophile? From what I've read, I believe that he was sexually aroused by little girls (and may have wanted to *be* one), but that his desire to protect girls (including Parobek) was sincere, and that he would have been genuinely repelled by the thought of sexual activity with children. We can't know for sure, but Darger was almost certainly a virgin when he died, precisely one day after his 81st birthday.

'In the Realms of the Unreal' uses several gimmicky visual devices. The decision to make animated cartoons from several Darger murals is a good one, and the stiff-legged 'lazy' animation technique used here is appropriate to the material. Less commendable is Yu's decision at several points to use new artwork that paraphrases Darger's themes; audiences will mistake these images for actual Darger artwork. I'll rate this powerful documentary 8 points out of 10.

IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL is a 2004 documentary film by Jessica Yu introducing the life and work of Henry Darger. A major figure of "outsider art", Darger's work was only discovered after his death when his landlords found thousands of pages of text and paintings in his room. Through his long life, he was known to his few friends and associates only as a janitor in a local hospital. Secretly, he wrote a massive manuscript chronicling the rebellion of girl slaves in a fantasy world, painted with watercolors of the heroines and battles.

Yu has chosen three main narrators for the documentary. A little girl (Dakota Fanning, even) narrates Darger's biographical facts, while excerpts from Darger's autobiography are reads by an old man (Larry Pine), and texts from his fantasy epic are read by some fellow with a radio play delivery. In addition, we find interviews with people who knew Darger. Kiyoko Lerner, his landlady and now the caretaker of his legacy, is of course featured, as are some of his neighbours and an altar boy from his church. While everyone reports him to be an odd fellow, Yu avoids the controversial issue of Darger's mental health, preserving the ambiguity of whether he was mad or a mere eccentric. Similarly, the relation of Darger's work to sexual frustrations or the possibility of sexual abuse as a child are left out. But this is a mere introduction, and it's reasonable to expect the viewer to move on to other sources for contentious matters. My only real complaint is that Yu is not always content to let Darger's paintings speak for themselves. Rather, she has animated certain of Darger's scenes, which I feel distorts the paintings to a degree. While I think the film does not deserve a one-star rating for this as another reviewer awarded it, it is troubling.

Nonetheless, all in all this is a fine presentation of a remarkable figure. And if Darger's intrigues you, I'd recommend also discovering Adolf Wolfli, a Swiss madman whose life and work resembles Darger in several years.