Documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu's goal was to explore what inspired Henry Darger to create the child heroines of his paintings and immense novel.

The clincher for filmmaker Jessica Yu to commit to making her documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, an eclectic look at the life and artwork of self-taught artist Henry Darger, was visiting his rented room in Chicago. (The film opens Friday at the Cincinnati Art Museum for a limited run.)

"When I went to visit his apartment, I wasn't going there thinking about making a film," Yu says, speaking recently by phone from Los Angeles. "Being there made me think that I want to make the film ... you stand there in the center and you experience it how he experienced it. So in the film, the room becomes a substitute for Darger."

It's easy to understand her excitement if you know Darger's story -- a childhood like something from a Charles Dickens novel, a reclusive life and a lonely death at age 81 in 1973.

Henry J. Darger was born in 1892 and lived with his father, a Chicago tailor. When his father became disabled, Darger was sent to a Catholic asylum, a place he repeatedly tried to escape (and finally did at age 16). He lived the rest of his life as a recluse, attending mass as many as five times daily and working as a janitor in Catholic hospitals. He lived in a rented room in a then blue-collar Lincoln Park.

When Darger died, "outsider art" -- a term for work created by an artist without formal art school training -- hadn't yet been conceived. His acceptance by museums and dealers was years away.

Darger's landlord Nathan Lerner discovered his artwork, including a 15,000-page novel, The Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Lerner and his wife, Kiyoko, preserved the vast collection and kept Darger's room intact. Years later, the Lerners learned that a genius shared their roof.

There are only three known photos of Darger and no home movies, the type of materials documentary filmmakers usually have at their disposal. That made the project even more exciting, but Yu says her goal remained constant: What inspired Darger to create the child heroines of his writings and paintings, the Vivian Girls?

Yu spent five years making In the Realms of the Unreal, working on other projects while making it. Studying Darger became an obsession. Yu says she read his novel on microfilm, searched for a postcard from the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded (where Darger was sent as a young boy) and purchased a replica Remington typewriter, the same model Darger used.

Yu has covered artists before, including handicapped writer Mark O'Brien and an artist colony based in the New York Mental Institution for her film The Living Museum. But Darger differed from her past subjects. He consumed her life. She found herself imagining minute details: What would Darger look like walking down a Chicago street?

Yu, 39, was born in New York City and grew up in San Francisco. After college, she worked in film production and honed her directing skills at NBC-TV's director diversity program. Today she considers documentary filmmaking her expertise, and stories like Darger's fascinate her.

Darger occupies a special place in the canon of outsider art. It's not just about living on the fringes of society. Darger's story begins and ends with his artwork, especially the enormous illustrated novel encompassing 12 volumes and more than 15,000 single-spaced typed pages. The story is pure fantasy. On an unnamed planet (of which Earth is a moon), the good Christian nation of Abbieannia wars with the Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement. The heroines are the seven sisters, princesses who face battles and atrocities but ultimately succeed.

Darger's massive, two-sided artworks consist of pencil on paper drawings painted over with watercolor and boosted with the additions of collage. His method included tracing blown-up comics and movie posters. Yu wanted to experiment with the film to re-create Darger's artwork. She hired animators to bring to life elements found in Darger's watercolors.

Darger died in obscurity, never able to afford decent paper, but today his artwork is part of private collections and housed in museums around the world. The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan acquired 22 paintings (15 of them are double-sided) in 2001 with other Darger ephemera.

"Darger has grown into a fascinating cottage industry, and now there are other artists inspired by Darger's work," Yu says.

Poet John Ashbury's 96-page poem "Girls on the Run" is based on Darger's Vivian Girls, and the work has inspired choreographer Pat Graney to create a modern dance piece.

Yu just returned from Boston and New York City, where she attended standing-room-only screenings of In the Realms of the Unreal.

Yu takes issue with the term outsider art, feeling that it ghettoizes the artwork and makes someone like Darger trendy.

"The irony is that Darger was the ultimate insider," she points out. "He deliberately stepped away from the real world and created his own world."

The difference between the labels like outsider artist, self-taught artist and folk artist confuse some. But American Folk Art Museum Curator Brooke Davis Anderson pays little attention to the labels. With Darger, everything revolves around the artwork.

"I don't think it's the term that people apply to outsider art that has made Darger popular," Anderson says. "What people are responding to is the great artistry and significant execution."

"Everybody takes liberties," Yu points out. "My film is not trying to be objective anyway. It is a description of the artist I imagined. It is more emotional -- a feeling you have when you look at the paintings.

"I don't know if anyone out to make a PBS film about Napoleon goes out and wears a three-corner hat. But it's impossible to do anything about Darger and not become obsessed." ©