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Film/Art: Henry Darger
By Andréa Picard
Despite my nagging sense of responsibility, I emphatically do not want to see In the Realms of the Unreal for a second time. In my tarrying, there is silent protest amid internal debate, because my memory, alas, is imprinted, not with images but frustration and hostility toward a film I saw nearly a year ago in a hectic setting at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and which I mistakenly kept referring to as In the Realms of the Senses. The film was Jessica Yu’s much-lauded In the Realms of the Unreal and my slip of the tongue should not be forgiven. (The film was reviewed semi-favourably in the last issue of CinemaScope, as well as enthusiastically in countless publications upon its North American release, effectively reminding me of my objections.) Ostensibly an investigation into the mysterious life of America’s “foremost outsider art” figure, Henry Darger, Yu’s film fails to surmount the realm of speculation, and relies heavily on the same information, like endless overtures with no sign of an end.
In the Realms of the Unreal does not plunge us into the parallel worlds of Henry Darger, as the film’s press kit claims. Instead, it recounts, in staid and unsteady interviews, what precious little is known about a reclusive shut-in who produced what is likely one of the largest manuscripts of fiction, weighing in at a hefty 15,145 pages. Uncovered upon his death in April of 1973 by Darger’s landlords, 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 was bound by hand and in 15 volumes. Three additional books were found, containing over 300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, many of which feature illustrations on both sides, probably a result of Darger’s relative poverty. Alongside a 5,000-page sequel titled Adventures in Chicago, as well as a 3,000-page autobiography, they form Henry Darger’s body of work—a posthumous discovery that consequentially sent minor ripples through the often picayunish terrain that is art history. While the literary work continues to be read and dissected by a group of scholars, the illustrations have penetrated certain prestigious art circles. His naïve, fantastical drawings have left an indelible mark on contemporary drawing styles, which often blend a childlike aesthetic with dark, suggestive psychological undercurrents, or cutting satire (see, for instance, the collective works from Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge, or Torontonian Shary Boyle). This renaissance has found summation in the remarkable success of the graphic novel. Illustration seems to have surpassed painting and photography within a fair number of gallery settings. As contentious and vague (and objectionable) as it is, the term “outsider artist” is most often used to describe untrained (i.e., unschooled, unmentored) artists, sometimes poor and disenfranchised, and those with mental illness. Henry Darger probably fits all of the above criteria, and the air of mystery surrounding his life (few photos of him exist, few meaningful encounters are remembered, etc.) make him a prime cult candidate, not to mention a challenging subject for documentary.
With a significant amount of newfound interest in his life and work, Darger has spawned theatre productions; a few books; an all-girl British band called the Vivian Girls, named after those prancing Coppertone baby princesses with penises who lead the rebellion in Darger’s epic novel; and now Yu’s documentary, five years in the making. Only recently (say, the last ten years), he has been referred to as the “best outsider artist America has produced.” Is this so ironic a statement that it effectively cancels out its own perverse irony? An orphaned, neglected, “feeble minded” poor man is what America has proudly produced? The film tells us how Darger was not offered any kind of assistance nor support, and that he was forced to suffer alone in silence and in relatively abject conditions. And yet, In the Realms prominently features Darger’s former landlords, Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner, who reminisce about rather banal details, his strange comings and goings and his quirks. The Lerners play the role of experts in the documentary, as well as witness to this rather tragic existence.
Add a sadder ending to a sad life when these thoughtful, understanding landlords somehow become the beneficiaries of his estate and give in to the pull of greed. Wouldn’t Darger’s unpublished work, both literary and visual, fall to the State of Illinois in the absence of kin? As a photographer keen to the inner-workings of the art market, Nathan Lerner actively tore apart some of Darger’s work in order to reap the exploits. Yu’s film fails to offer this information, as it is the Lerners who do most of the telling, which is understandable considering the filmmaker had sought full access to Darger’s former apartment, manuscripts, and works in order to make her documentary. There is something amiss here, and it’s more than the potential darker side of Darger’s broken, ailing personality. It’s easy to retain his eccentricities, to read into his obsessive nature and the fact he tried to adopt a child on his own despite barely being able to function as a member of society. So the work was salvaged from the trash bin, rescued by his art-smart landlords who knew not to throw out the drawings and books, and preserved his apartment as-is—recognizing that a mad, potentially brilliant artist was living upstairs from them. (Is this a happy ending?) There are conflicting reports about how the work became disseminated into the art world and into public recognition. The Lerners have indeed donated a vast amount of Darger’s work, especially to the American Folk Museum where the Henry Darger Center (a not-for-profit foundation) was later assembled in 1997. But what about the thievery and exploitation? Should they be dismissed in the wake of the Lerners’ efforts to conserve Darger’s legacy? Some of the works were undoubtedly split (presumably the multi-panels) and sold off as individual pieces. This is what I wanted to learn from the documentary once it introduced the extraordinary circumstances in which Darger had produced a museum’s worth of art.
In the Realms of the Unreal cannot escape similar accusations. Who granted Jessica Yu the right to animate Darger’s drawings, which were most decidedly not storyboards, not meant to be motion pictures? With what legitimacy did she engage child star Dakota Fanning to lend voice to the Vivian Girls, a shocking appropriation of Darger’s work, altering its meaning irrevocably for those who have not encountered his work prior to seeing the film—surely a vast percentage of the audience. It’s not only shameful but ethically wrong. The animation constitutes a significant transformation (read: bastardization) of Darger’s work. With flights of fancy, his drawings leap up off the screen in a real motion that he never intended, adding swift sequence to the two-dimensional illustrations. Naturally one can think of Darger’s drawings as accompanying illustrations to his novel, and they do employ chronology and exhibit typological import. They are most vivid in recounting the story Darger has astonishingly dreamed up, perhaps as a means to escape his own dreary life of solitude, inexperience, and inopportunity. To animate his work, to give his characters voice and plunge them into an orchestral world of sound is to violate his creation. What right does the filmmaker have to interpret his work in such a bold way, all the while repudiating the idea of “interpretation” or “criticism” so not as to lend pretension to her own project? “Eschewing expert opinion,” the press kit proudly declares, the film seeks to immerse us in Darger’s antic world of whimsy provoking a purely emotive response. Yu, consistently throughout the documentary, depicts Darger’s interior battles, as reflected through the drama of both his make-believe and his real worlds. Plenty of inarticulate implications are made in the realms.
While Walter Benjamin long ago signalled his clarion call against mechanical reproduction and its destructive effect on the aura of an original work of art, Yu has systematically stripped the aura from Darger’s work by using it in ways it was probably never meant to be experienced and shown. The fact is, we’ll never know for sure. When I saw the film in Cleveland, I shuffled uneasily in my seat, confounded by the audience’s clear enjoyment of the drawings come to life and the cutesy voice narrating the story. As appalling and reprehensible as it seemed to me, my fellow viewers appeared reasonably entertained and engaged, suggesting that Yu had created a successful documentary that introduced an unknown artist to those not necessarily aware of figures in the art world without iconic status. When the screening finally ended, the audience clapped enthusiastically and began to commiserate about this new person in the world. Guests of the festival were then invited to an art gallery across town to view a large, original, two-sided triptych Darger, which formed the centrepiece to a group show of “outsider” drawings. This was the second Darger I would see in the flesh, the first being a few years ago in Chicago, his hometown. When we arrived, everyone circled around the horizontal, glass-enclosed panel, identifying the characters whose acquaintance they had just made. They were charming, nymphish, and intriguing creatures. The piece had allure with its pleasantly pale palette of light blues, golds, pinks, and carmine, and its various battles and details demanded that one look closely as not to miss an important piece of the puzzle. Suddenly someone cried out, “Can’t you just hear that cute girl’s voice?” Then, like Glenn Gould, I was instantly aware of matching comments overwhelming me from every direction: “I can see their legs moving still,” “It was funny in the film when the girls…,” and on and on it went. The animation had impressed upon people’s minds a certain aesthetic and style that were a composite of Darger and the filmmaker’s vision. Viewers were simply not able to examine Darger’s work without seeing the collaborative effort Yu had forced the work into becoming.
To reconstruct a life is one thing, to do it respectfully is another—think of the authorized versus the unauthorized biography. Perhaps I’m arguing in favour of the memoir, which needn’t necessarily be laden with truthfulness. The best memoirs harbour an unassuming mix of fact (candour and quiet) and fiction (exaggeration, false recollection, embellishment, and open-faced lies). The two bleed into one another, creating an ambiguous heightened form of expression. It becomes almost beside the point to believe everything described in brilliant memoirs like George Steiner’s Errata, J.M. Coetzee’s Youth, and Martin Amis’ Experience, to cite rather recent examples. Books like Speak, Memory annihilate their own truth through pretension and self-aggrandizing myth. Even then, truth doesn’t matter so much, does it? Rather, the verbosity and swaggering feats of a seven-year-old Nabokov did not find that hidden, strange distance of reflection. That painful, sour taste of yearning is oddly absent in Speak, Memory , eclipsed by an abiding precociousness in the throes of self-creation. The telling is too clean, too predicated, too assured. Self-doubt is coloured in self-doubt, clothed in it, but not endured. There is madness in this greatness and it fights with time, against the expiration of consciousness, not existence. Funny that.
In the Realms of the Unreal takes the form of the unauthorized biography, and deep within it lurks a lengthy memoir (little used in the film) and a huge creative cropping (without evaluation or context). Like most overzealous biographers, Jessica Yu has found a sneaky way to invade the world of her subject, but unlike the often-seductive demimonde of most celebrated subjects of biography, the drudgery of Darger’s life remains safely untethered. The alliance is struck through an imposed dialogue with the work, a question of appropriation rather than affinity. Darger is thus resurrected and defeated yet again.
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In the Realms of the Unreal
Articles in this Section
Editor’s Note
Global Discoveries on DVD
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Film/Art: Henry Darger By Andréa Picard
and in the magazine...
Books Around by Olaf Möller
Animation: JJ Villard By Chris Robinson
Back Page: Your In-Flight Entertainment By Don McKellar
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