Review: Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell on Criterion Blu-ray

Decades after its original release, Martin Bell’s Streetwise remains a boldly empathetic work of vérité portraiture. Throughout the 1984 documentary, Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall follow a group of kids on the streets of Seattle as they panhandle, dig food out of dumpsters, and sell their bodies to much older men. These scenes are accompanied by voiceovers from the young subjects, who describe their actions with a heartbreaking casualness that communicates two almost contradictory meanings: that they’re seasoned hustlers, having bypassed childhood for an everyday form of hell, and that they’re desperate to be seen precisely as hustlers. To show emotion is to be vulnerable, and these kids can’t afford to be seen as weak, yet the filmmakers capture more here than their subjects may have suspected, as Streetwise is charged by a deep, subterranean yearning to be loved.

A plot hasn’t been imposed on Streetwise, as the audience is allowed to feel the numbing monotony of life on the fringes. People swing in and out of prison, crash in and out of secret hovels, most notably an abandoned hotel, and practice their grifts, while struggling with overlapping tides of addiction and depression. We also learn, startlingly, that not all these children are homeless. Streetwise’s most famous subject, Erin Blackwell, a.k.a. “Tiny,” lives with her mother, a waitress and alcoholic who rationalizes her daughter’s sex work as a phase and who seems to be impressed with Erin’s ability to make a few hundred dollars on a good day. It’s little wonder that Erin captured and continued to command the filmmakers’ attention for decades after filming Streetwise ended, as she has a squinty yet expressive glare that suggests both a deep reservoir of pain as well as intense fierceness.

Bell, Mark, and McCall take Erin and her cohorts, most vividly a skinny boy with potential tonsillitis named DeWayne Pomeroy, at face value. Streetwise is pointedly devoid of the sermonizing that might allow audiences to comfortably distance themselves from these people, regarding them simply as elements of a civics lesson. The film forces us to confront the obviousness of these children’s circumstances, as people walk by them just as we all walk by the homeless on a daily basis. This sense of culpability informs Streetwise with an uncomfortable texture that’s familiar to documentaries concerned with poor or mentally and emotionally challenged people, so you may wonder how the filmmakers shot what we’re seeing without stepping in and helping these people. Particularly disturbing is when Erin, 13 years old at the start of filming, is seen getting into a car with an old man who’s obviously a john.

If Streetwise was just a portrait of damnation and delusion, it would be an important document. But the film is also haunting for Bell, Mark, and McCall’s attention to the transcendence than can be felt even in such extreme circumstances. After Erin has gotten into trouble, DeWayne tells her of how he will rescue her, and his attempt at gallantry is poignant as well as devastating. When DeWayne visits his father in prison, the old man lectures the boy about keeping his smoking down and laying off the hard drugs, commanding DeWayne to roll up his shirt sleeves for a track-mark inspection. As brutally sad as this confrontation is, one feels this father’s love and wonders if DeWayne, clearly a sensitive and lonely boy, can feel it too. Retrospectively, it hardly matters: DeWayne hung himself not long after this visit.

Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell, a 2016 sequel to Streetwise that’s been in the works for thirtysomething years, offers a variety of unmooring contrasts to its predecessor. Erin is no longer the slim spitfire of Streetwise, but an overweight fortysomething mother of 10 children who understandably appears to always be on the verge of exhaustion, and who takes methadone in an attempt to keep her drug addictions at bay while wrangling with her children’s own skirmishes with the law. Looking at Erin now, one sees the scars and weariness left by a hard life, part of which was documented by Streetwise, and one can implicitly feel Erin’s need for atonement. Though Erin’s gotten off the streets, living in a large home with her partner, Will, and several of her children, the streets have never left her.

Formally, Tiny is much different from Streetwise. The 1984 film abounds in seamy noises and textures, with roving camerawork that seems to be uncovering a new lurid discovery every few seconds; it feels palpably dangerous, and probably inspired films such as Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and Larry’s Clark’s Kids. Set predominantly in Erin’s home, Tiny is slower and more polished, reflecting the (comparative) stability that Erin has achieved since appearing in Streetwise. Tiny also has a fancier structure than Streetwise, with a framing device in which Erin watches footage of herself over the years, including unused outtakes from the first film, with Mary Ellen Mark. An autumnal tone seeps into the new film, which offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the unending legacies of crime and addiction.

As in Streetwise, Bell proves uncannily adept at capturing moments that seem to encapsulate a subject’s entire emotional temperature. There are frequent shots in Tiny of Erin sleeping with a little dog close to her face, which suggest rare moments of repose for a woman who’s used to running her chaotic family like a hostage negotiator. Erin frequently calls the cops on her children, which Bell unforgettably rhymes with footage of a younger Erin visiting two of her children in foster care. (One of those children, Keanna, is now a mother herself, and resents Erin for abandoning her and for continuing to struggle with drug use.)

Which is to say that Tiny is as charged with turmoil as Streetwise, and Bell proves equally capable here of rendering full relationships with only a few images or seconds of running time. As in Streetwise, our sympathies are rarely overtly directed, as Tiny is somehow on every character’s contradictory wavelength at once, illustrating how difficult understanding can be to achieve, most notably in the face of disaster. Though it runs a trim 87 minutes, Tiny offers an epic and piercing portrait of a large biracial family that’s plagued by essentially every demon known to American society. Erin escaped the streets only to fashion a home that’s rife with the very issues that drove her away from her own mother. Like most people, regardless of social stature, Erin is stuck in the temporal loop of her own inherent nature.

Image/Sound

The high-definition digital presentations of Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Brockwell are both sharp and highly detailed, with soundtracks that preserve the films’ starkly intimate aural landscapes. Due to its raw, ragged beauty, Streetwise is the more visually impactful film, rife with street scenes with many variations of light, shadow, and noise. By contrast, Tiny is more formally familiar, suggesting a reality TV show about a struggling family at home. But the Tiny presentation is no less attentive, especially to faces, with every pore and wrinkle preserved with a vividness that underscores each subject’s exposure and vulnerability.

Extras

New interviews with director Martin Bell and editor Nancy Baker offer evocative glimpses of their collaboration with deceased photographer and producer Mary Ellen Mark on Streetwise, Tiny, and several short films. Bell’s testimonial is particularly poignant. Mark was his partner romantically as well, and he contextualizes the films as mirrors into their personal relationship. In this light, the short “Streetwise” Revisited: Rat, also included here, is even more moving than is already apparent, as one can see that Bell is as eager to make sense of the past as his subject. In the film, Bell catches up with one of Streetwise’s most vivid subjects 40 years later, a man now in middle age who’s managed to take control of his existence.

Two shorts about Erin Brockwell are also included on the disc, and both document her life between Streetwise and Tiny as she transitions from a hustler to a struggling mother of 10 children. These shorts are seen throughout Tiny, and they’re often watched on screen by Brockwell, functioning as part of a slipstream between reality and the intersection of life and art-making these projects cumulatively represent. (A fourth short on this disc, “The Amazing Plastic Lady,” about a circus in India, is also beautifully, fiercely empathetic.)

A new audio commentary on Streetwise with Bell is a worthy listen, as the director tells supplemental stories of the children that he and his collaborators spent nearly two months filming. Bell also offers fascinating insights about the film’s formal construction, such as how Streetwise’s distinctive blend of imagery and voiceover was sometimes informed by a need to paper over missing footage with an audio interview captured at a different time—a mark of convenience and invention that invests the film with a haunted, unresolved quality.

Rounding out the package is a booklet featuring a new essay by Andrew Hedden, journalist Cheryl McCall’s 1983 Life article about the homeless children in Seattle who would subsequently appear in Streetwise, and reflections about Blackwell written by Mark in 2015. These pieces are every bit as urgent and moving as Streetwise and Tiny.

Overall

Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Brockwell are social documents as searingly personal street art, and Criterion has outfitted them with robust transfers and revealing extras.