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When Henry Darger died in 1973, his landlords found that the recluse had led a much more vibrant life than anyone imagined, through the writing and painting that had been the focal point of his life. Darger’s 15,000 page In the Realms of the Unreal, the work which give this film its name, was the centerpiece, a story of child slavery, epic world war, and battles between the Christians and heathens. Jessica Yu, who previously won an Oscar for her documentary work, tackles the task of illuminating Darger’s life and work, piecing together testimony from the few people who knew Darger at all, and using the man’s own words and illustrations as the film’s primary means of communication. Conveniently, Darger had also worked on an autobiography, which Yu lifts passages from, intertwining this selections with fragments of Darger’s story, illuminating the influence that his life had on his work. Yu uses simple animation of the drawings in what might be an attempt to allow the viewer to experience them as actively as one might imagine Darger did, not as simple watercolors on freezer paper. The animation sometimes seems too busy, but Yu’s use of it is often quite tasteful. In a lot of ways, this film doesn’t have much of an overarching idea to pull it together, though there’s something to be said for Yu’s very neutral presentation of Darger’s life and work. An interesting facet of the story Yu on glances over is what happened to Darger’s work after his death. His landlords kept his apartment as he had left it for thirty years, allowing people to see and experience his work. Darger has had exhibits in galleries all over the world, and excerpts of his writing have found publication. This is all well and good, but the elevation of Darger to a sort of outsider art darling by the art world seems an unfitting legacy for a man so reserved and private. Yu’s documentary, though, approaches Darger with sensitivity, allowing, for the most part, the man to tell his own story, and that’s something to be thankful for.

In the Realms of the Unreal at Amazon