Trying to connect with an artist of disconnect

Jessica Yu’s hotel room lies a few blocks away from Union Square, the hub of a high-end retail district where some of the city’s hilliest streets begin to rise. That’s why tonight’s throngs of after-work shoppers, hauling their shopping bags up the sidewalks with their eyes to the ground, are looking a lot like mountaineers. Yu would never be mistaken for one. She walks briskly with light steps in her long jacket with a furry collar; it’s a windy, chilled mid-December evening.

“My first P.A. [production assistant] jobs were in San Francisco,” says Yu, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who moved back to the Bay Area after graduating from Yale in 1987. She grew up in Los Altos. The small, three-table coffee shop on Post Street that Yu has chosen is the kind of organic beanery that hangs the paintings of local artists on its colorful walls, though Yu ends up ordering orange juice and doesn’t look up at the artwork all that much. As the director of “In the Realms of the Unreal” -- the new feature-length documentary on the reclusive janitor and secret artist Henry Darger that is on the short list of likely Academy Award nominees -- Yu has other paintings on her mind and stranger literary examples to discuss.

What’s her take on Darger’s seemingly arbitrary insistence on drawing penises on the nude, prepubescent girls who leap and scatter, fight and die, beneath his pencil and brushstrokes? Granted, it’s the most sensational aspect of Darger’s bizarre fields of dreams -- his paintings, hundreds of them, were discovered for the first time in 1972 as he rested in a Chicago nursing home -- but it also seems one of the more useful in understanding the man’s extraordinary state of isolation and disconnect.

“Well, he didn’t have much of a female presence early in his life,” says Yu, 38, who was first introduced to Darger’s work at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition in the early 1990s. “His mother dies when he’s a baby, his sister is put up for adoption, and he grew up in boys’ homes.”

In the film, someone who knew Darger offers the possibility that he was ignorant of the female anatomy; there’s popular speculation that he died a virgin at age 81; writings delving deeper into the Darger mystery inevitably find comfort in Freud. He draws the genitals matter-of-factly. They’re never erect or disproportionately large, and yet, oddly, Darger often shows the outline of a girl’s penis even through the clothing she’s wearing, as if it were a natural occurrence in young boys too.

“But what’s really interesting about it is that it’s not all that interesting in the larger scope of his work. As I was researching, I kept thinking,” and Yu begins to laugh now, “these penises are by no means the most remarkable thing that’s going on!”

In Darger’s “outsider art,” the cat-faced or dragon-winged monsters could easily come from a nursery rhyme or the Apocalypse -- as the works are by a devout Catholic apparently inspired by the purity of children and especially young girls, both texts equally resonate. And for all the wide-eyed colors he used to depict flowers and butterflies and girls’ pretty dresses, Darger also painted bloodbaths: children being boiled, burned, disemboweled, crucified and strangled by men.

In one arresting piece, Darger paints a picturesque sky, and in the blue expanse where other Catholics have claimed holier sightings, there’s a larger-than-life apparition of a girl being strangled by large hands, while on the ground children are being pursued.

“There were things that disturbed me all the time in my research, but that just made me want to know more,” says Yu, who saw an immediate challenge in creating a presence of Darger with just three surviving photos of him to work with. “There’s so much incomplete knowledge here, and I knew that the film had to embrace that fact as well -- the idea that we all kind of missed our chance to know him.”

Yu took a solid year to research Darger’s life and work, which also includes a 5,000-page handwritten autobiography he started in 1963. But she decided early not to invite scholars, psychologists and art critics to speak in the film. Only people who knew Darger were interviewed, including his last landlord, Kiyoko Lerner, who preserved Darger’s apartment for nearly three decades.

“I avoided reading stuff about him,” says Yu, “not because I thought my opinions were more valid, but I just wanted to clear my mind so I could have the experience of going through and making the discoveries -- ‘What would that be like?’ I wanted that experience in the film so that audiences could have something that would approximate that.”

Animated sequences

A grand discovery opens the film, when the camera reveals Darger’s secret workshop. Yu was able get a jib arm into Darger’s small room, which allowed her to mimic a visitor’s smooth, careful movements while looking at his cluttered table, the dried-up watercolor paints, the mended army jackets, the aged children’s books. Yu still remembers her first time walking into Darger’s room -- “It was so beautiful, everything was sort of a rusty gold color” -- and she was fortunate to get her camera inside before Lerner permanently dismantled Darger’s room in 2000.

The last two years of filmmaking -- the documentary took five years to make -- were dedicated to post-production and remarkable animated sequences. Yu’s team of artists scanned Darger’s drawings and collages and used them as source material. The animators then rendered a different layer for each moving limb or blowing skirt in a scene. Some animated sequences had over 800 layers.

Animating the people and creatures in Darger’s work was an appropriate choice for Yu, since Darger’s paintings are essentially illustrations to his larger creative realm: a world told in 15,145 typewritten pages, bound in 15 volumes, in what may be the longest novel ever written.

“At first, I thought I was going to plant my flag at the end of the novel as the first person to have read all of it -- no way,” Yu shakes her head. “You realize very quickly that the novel was more of a writing experience than it is a reading experience. The rhythm of the novel is like a soap opera, where something amazing happens everyday. So I read just enough to get the themes and patterns.”

The novel, which Darger started writing around 1910, chronicles the war between two countries, one cruel and godless and the other free and Catholic, over the issue of child slavery. His prized heroines are the seven Vivian Sisters, with ages ranging from 5 to 7, who alternately become naked victims and sword-toting emancipators during the long struggle.

“It seemed to me, weirdly enough, that he was building the elements of a film,” says Yu. “He wrote the story, some of the paintings were basically storyboards, he did character sketches, he kept statistics, drew maps, wrote lyrics to the battle songs -- they sort of cried out to be put together in a film.”

Yu looks as young and as fashionable as she did when she picked up her Oscar for “Breathing Lessons” in 1997 and gave the show’s producers one of those memorable zingers when she said, “You know you’ve entered new territory when your outfit cost more than your film.” Now a successful director of commercials and television (“ER,” “The West Wing,” “American Dreams”), she has found the new territory to be comfortably homey.

She’s in San Francisco to promote her new film (which opened Friday in Los Angeles), but Yu lives in La Canada Flintridge with her family (the author Mark Salzman and their two young children). She looks at home here, though, if truth be told.

A quick trip across the Bay Bridge and to Berkeley would take Yu back to the spot where she shot “Breathing Lessons” over a decade ago. The film follows the life and work of Mark O’Brien, a polio-stricken poet, journalist and UC Berkeley graduate who had to live most of his life in a full-body respiratory capsule, or “iron lung.”

“There’s something amazing to me about people who can find freedom in their creative work that’s not provided in their own lives,” says Yu, who also directed the 1999 HBO documentary “The Living Museum,” about a group of artists residing in a New York mental institution.

“It’s not like I’m making films about people overcoming odds through art,” says Yu. “Because that’s not really the end of it -- they don’t fully overcome the odds, to me, through the art.”