Jessica Yu

An example of Henry Darger's "outsider art." Courtesy Mongrel Media

For 40 years, an aging man occupied the same plain room in a house in downtown Chicago. Henry Darger was maybe mustachioed, maybe short, though only three curled black-and-white photos of him exist and everyone remembers him differently, if at all. After working as a janitor all day, he returned to his room each night, sometimes stopping to talk to one of his neighbors about the weather (the fallibility of meteorology was a personal obsession), or visiting church for the eighth or ninth time that week (mass was only a slightly bigger obsession than weather). If he had been British, comments an acquaintance in the documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, he would have been labeled “eccentric.” In America – “crazy.”

When Darger died at a Catholic poor house in 1973 at age 81, without family and with few friends, the landlords of the house he had recently vacated unlocked the door to his room to find a mess, and a revelation: hundreds of paintings; boxes of writing; and an illustrated 15,000 page, multi-volume novel about a war between a gang of noble school children called the Vivian Girls, and the Glandelinians, an evil army of child-nabbing slave drivers.

The pictures were sometimes dotted with bloody Biblical imagery – naïve William Blake – but more often, they resembled the loving, intricate illustrations from a child’s reader as seen through a kaleidoscope of water colour and fancy. Darger’s work was at once innocent and disturbing: the knee-soxed girls had penises and fought like warriors. His landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, protected the sheaves of art (most of the work now resides at the L.A. County Museum of Art) and Henry Darger became one of the world’s most celebrated “outsider” artists.

Filmmaker Jessica Yu first encountered Darger’s paintings at an exhibit 12 years ago. “I thought: What a weirdo,” she says now from her L.A. office. “I felt like the work was amazing, but so alien.”

Yu went on to make Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, a film about an artist in an iron lung. In 1997, it won an Oscar for best documentary. Famously, Yu, a gorgeous Yale graduate who looked a decade younger than 31, took to the podium and said: “You know you’ve entered new territory when your outfit cost more than your film.”

Soon, she appeared in magazines shilling for Coach handbags and Platinum Guild International USA; she was marketed as the first sexy documentary filmmaker. But the brush with fame eventually ended. Even though television producer John Wells hand-picked her for a director’s program, leading to work shooting shows like ER and The West Wing, Yu, like most in her field, continued to fight for funding and search for projects. Five years ago, she came back to Darger at a friend’s suggestion, visiting his preserved room in Chicago (it was finally disassembled in 2000 after Yu completed filming there). She had her subject, and the result is an unconventional documentary without expert opinion or even much traditional explication. Instead, the film merges tales of Darger’s life with sequences from the great war that makes up the bulk of his tome, The Realms of the Unreal. Yu animates Darger’s art – a controversial decision – and tries to tell his story from within his strange world, rather than analyze it from ours. As with Breathing Lessons, Yu has made a movie about the sanctuary of art, and an artist who challenges the idea that solitude is the same thing as loneliness.