Australian Centre for the Moving Image: Three photos exist of Henry Darger, who was 81-years-old when he passed away in his hometown of Chicago in 1973; he’s looking at the camera in one of them. But what he did leave behind, like a prophet who was fated never to be heard, was many lives worth of writing and art. When his landlords and neighbour ventured into his cluttered bedsit they found alternate worlds: a 15,000 page fantasy novel, hundreds of accompanying illustrations, many more thousands of pages from other texts, including approximately 4800 on his youthful memories of a 1908 tornado. Darger died in the same Chicago poorhouse where his father expired; his artwork can now sell for up to $80,000.
Screening in an exclusive season at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, Jessica Yu’s 2004 documentary examines the miniscule public frontage and vast private existence of her unwilling subject. In the Realms of the Unreal – The Mystery of Henry Darger carefully details a life that was seemingly intended to slip between the cracks. Darger, who had lost first his mother and then his father by the age of eight, grew up in orphanages and state homes, becoming a janitor at age 17 and beginning a life of menial labour and his secretly prodigious output that was only briefly interrupted by military service during World War I.
Yu’s key resource is Darger’s posthumously catalogued work, notably his touchstone novel, 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. With a young Dakota Fanning reading from the text, and Larry Pine supplying Darger’s voice from further writings, the film examines the link between Darger’s life and the fictional world he described. Here, creativity is a form of necessity, with a former institutionalised and abused child writing a fantasy world where children are slaves who are wronged to excess even as a war is fought to free them.
Yu avoids retrospective judgment of Darger’s work, merely noting by way of a coda that it is the artwork – considered a leading example of outsider art – that now commands commercial value. Often working from pictures of murdered and disappeared children in the newspapers, Darger traced, sketched and made collages, all with a fascinating aesthetic and colour palette; the endless handwritten pages, by contrast, are valued for their academic worth, in that they show how Darger turned one life into an imaginary other. The Story of the Vivian Girls, aside from its quixotic length, reflects the worldview of a recluse who virtually only spoke when alone in his room (a neighbour, hearing voices, thought Darger was secretly popular, but it was just him conversing as various characters); the novel’s Henry Darger was a great man, determined to defend the horribly exploited child slaves.
However, the director’s decision, towards the end, to have some of Darger’s signature drawings animated appears at odds with Darger’s narrow focus, and aside from diverting the eye it does little to illuminate her subject. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating portrait of a unique life – not even the people who went to Catholic mass with him every day remember him clearly, separately placing him at the front, back and middle of the church. And Yu doesn’t try to make a retrospective case for Darger’s greatness, or paint him as tragic loss to public life. When his neighbour tells Darger on his deathbed that he likes the illustrations he has just seen, he replies with just three words: 'Too late now".
