HEROINES IN REAL LIFE

Lincoln Clarkes' honest photographs of Downtown Eastside women manage
to find hope and life where there appears to be none

In her review of Walter Hill's 1979 kitsch urban western The Warriors,
the New Yorker's veteran film critic and social commentator Pauline
Kael recalled a scene in which a pair of preppies on a New York subway
make eye contact with a gang of trouble-seeking Latino street kids.

It wouldn't go down like that, Kael wrote: Sheltered, middle-class
kids from a nice neighbourhood would never make eye contact with gang
members on their turf.

That hyper-awareness of one's immediate surroundings -- knowing that
something is there but pretending it doesn't exist, for fear of being
caught looking -- lies at the heart of Heroines, Stan Feingold's
art-house documentary about the heroin ghetto of Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside as seen through the eyes of Vancouver photographer Lincoln
Clarkes.

Clarkes' photographic obsession with the forgotten women of the street
- -- a far cry from the fashion runways of Paris where Clarkes honed his
visual style -- is a study in pain and intimacy; artistic expression
fuelled by passion and moral outrage, an odyssey as harrowing in its
own way as the stories of the young women who pose for Clarkes' camera
and riff on the personal journeys that brought them to this point in
their lives.

Heroines is a visual tone poem and sociocultural counterpoint to the
tank-topped hotties and square-jawed hunks who stare out at the street
from magazine racks.

Cinematographer Brian Johnson's camera curves and sweeps around
Clarkes as he poses his subjects against crumbling facades and
needle-strewn alleys, but there is nothing exploitative or voyeuristic
in his work, or false about the sensitive way he talks his subjects
through their ordeal. The needle parks of the Downtown Eastside are a
war zone, Clarkes says, putting down his Rolleiflex during a moment of
reflection, "Completely surreal, like watching a movie. It's a movie
with drama, action, romance, horror, sex, panoramic sound. It's so
colourful, so vibrant that I can't help but notice it."

Through flashbacks -- grainy, black-and-white images of childhood
hopes and dreams lost -- and Clarkes' own images, which manage to find
hope and life where there appears to be none, Heroines creates a
living portrait, a document of lost lives.

A friend of Clarkes once told him his photographs were depressing;
Clarkes replied that it would be a lot more depressing if he didn't
take them. Heroines is the kind of search for honesty one finds more
often in fiction than fact. Facts are one-dimensional, novelist Joy
Fielding has said, but fiction often goes to the place where
emotional truth dwells.

Heroines has no narrator. Instead, Feingold relies on original poems
written and recited by Susan Musgrave, underscored by an eclectic
musical score by John Korsrud that recalls the folk truths of Joan
Baez and Woody Guthrie, muted and graced with the reverie of jazz
trumpet solos and cathedral chorals.

Musgrave's poems are painful, personal, uniquely observed. She climbs
inside the skin of Heroines' subjects, articulates their thoughts as
though they were her own: "A photograph is a secret about a secret e
The more it tells you, the less you see. So, what does this picture
say about me? I'm not a bad person. I'm not a bad person. I'm not a
bad person. I'm a drug addict."

Musgrave, author of last year's novel A Cargo of Orchids and the
ironically named collection of poems Forcing the Narcissus, breathes
life into repressed memories of addiction, betrayal, grief and
childhood abuse: "I promise him I'll do anything if that's what he
wants to hear. But mostly under all that promising, I'm not really
there. I'm a kid again, diving down deep to retrieve a coin of any
description. The man always let us keep what we came up with. I was
the best, because I could stay under the longest, coming up for air
only because I had to. I promised myself the good life. I had earned
it."

Children of abuse tend to fend for themselves by drawing inside, and
it takes the sensitivity of an artist or poet to draw them out again.
Clarkes is softspoken and gentle as he asks one woman, "Are you
feeling as good as you look?" and tells another to make sure she mails
the photo he took of her back to her mom, "because it's not going to
last long in your back pocket."

"I guess I do love myself to some degree," one young woman tells him,
"because I wouldn't be alive if I didn't."

"The fun's over, the party's over," another says. "The first year was
great, you know. Oh, this is fun, it's like Woodstock, you know,
sleeping in the park, living like gypsies. It's getting really old
now. It's taking its toll. I'm starting to look like a drug addict
now."

A city of hepcats and affluent babyboomers surges around them,
ignoring the blighted neighbourhood -- self-aware, but not observant.
Aware, but choosing not to look. Or looking, but choosing not to see.
Clarkes forces us to do both. Heroines is an eye-opener.

Heroines airs at 5 p.m. Sunday on Bravo!