in the realms of the unreal

Jessica Yu's outstanding documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, of outsider artist Henry Darger's lifelong work reminded me of my aspirations for documentary making. The film is permeated with a deep reverence and love for Henry Darger's art- which is difficult to access and perhaps easy to dismiss given its uneasy location outside of any recognizable artist status. Jessica Yu takes creative license and, with the aid of an animation team, animates Darger's beautiful and wholly original paintings, giving them a kind of final resolution that I believe Darger would have hoped for. As a recluse, Darger held menial labor jobs his whole life, while secretly working on his 15,000 page "novel" in his every spare minute. His work was only found posthumously, and has since been met with critical acclaim, establishing Darger as one of the most famous figures of outsider art. This film reminded me of another outsider artist- Thornton Dial of Mr. Dial Has Something To Say. Both Darger and Dial led hard lives of manual labor, and neither would have called what they did in their spare time Art. Their impulse to make art and this notion of "self-taught" artist calls into question the institution of art, access to it as well as a fundamental deconstruction of what art is. Jessica Yu uses a young girl's voice (10yr old Dakota Fanning) for the narrator, which evokes the voices of the Vivian girls, the heroines of Darger's epic. This tactic, combined with a seamlessly interwoven mix of third person biographical narrative and self described sentiments from Darger's own memoir flow in and out of excerpts from his manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, merging together into a deeply considered and crafted representation of Darger's mysterious and rich inner world. I kept marvelling at Darger's exceptional mastery of language and visual imagery with so little exposure to precedents and formal education. In the end, the film made me wonder how, in total solitude, Darger could fantasize in such detail, breadth and vivacity a world of loving colorful people.