Reviewed by Tim Wong

UNRAVELLED in bewitching states of grace and sexual disturbance, Jessica Yu’s voyage into Henry Darger’s Realms of the Unreal makes for a fascinating, though largely speculative documentary experience: a lowly janitor by trade, Darger’s extra curricular immersion in the creation of an epic illustrated novel, and its subsequent discovery upon his death in 1973, opens up a portal of mystery rich in exploration, but lacking in an epilogue or decisive final chapter. Was Darger a paedophile? A schizophrenic? Was he a lonely man, or was he his own best friend? Would he have permitted the Lerner’s to exhibit (and profit from?) his art after death? How to correctly pronounce his surname? What we do know is that he was a closet genius, an autodidact employing watercolour, collage, tracing techniques, and various degrees of appropriation in an oeuvre of 300 paintings, some over 10-feet long, and the titular magnum opus of this film, its glorious full title The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion encapsulating all that is weird and wonderful within the story’s massive 15,000 page breadth.

As Darger’s autobiography suggests, he never coherently made the transition from child to adulthood, spending a parentless adolescence in a youth asylum before having to fend for himself at the age of 17. Reclusive and poor, his intense introversion and complete disregard for the outside world manifested in these now revered works subsequently latched onto by the outsider art movement, kind of parodied recently by the Frank Hoyt Taylor character in Junebug. Like the paintings in that film, Darger’s art sports various sexual provocations: young girls are often depicted naked, with male genitalia, or as slaves of bondage. Just as Keith Haring’s erectile motifs can be attributed in part to his homosexuality, Darger’s unnatural – though perhaps genuinely innocent – impression of the opposite sex will inevitably be linked to a suppressed deviancy. Of course, like Henry’s landlord and tenement neighbours – the only living people to know him (and yet not know him) – we can only imagine what his world concealed.

» Jessica Yu | USA | 2005 | Opens March 15