For decades Henry Darger mopped floors in Chicago hospitals and spoke to almost no one. When his landlords cleared his room after his death in 1973, they found a 15,145-page novel and hundreds of vast, disturbing, beautiful watercolors nobody knew existed. He is now one of the most famous outsider artists in the world — and we still barely understand him.
The trailer for Jessica Yu's Oscar-nominated documentary, which animates Darger's paintings and lets you feel the scale and strangeness of the world he built alone.
The life behind the work: mother dead when he was four, years in an asylum, decades of hospital jobs, six weather journals, and church attended several times a day.
The manuscript itself: 15,145 pages across bound and unbound volumes, called by one art historian 'unquestionably the longest work of fiction ever written.'
A guide to the saga — the Vivian Girls, the Glandelinian war over enslaved children, and how The Wizard of Oz, Catholicism, and personal trauma fused into one epic.
The film's home page: how a reclusive janitor's private universe reached the screen, narrated by Dakota Fanning over dreamlike animation of his own images.
The complete 90-minute film. Watch it last, once you know the story, and let Darger's hidden life play out at full length.