Richard Sandler is a New York photojournalist and documentarian, and it's important to place the city before the profession, since so much of what he does is informed by where he is. Whatever the medium, the aim is authenticity--Sandler pushes to capture the "real" New York, warts and all, from street level and below.

His 2004 documentary Brave New York is an extended montage, assembled from roughly 12 years of camcorder footage shot in and around the East Village. Sandler takes his camera out to parks, street corners, and sidewalks, hanging out and shooting what he sees. He also lets people talk--street people and artists and passerby, mostly the kind of folks who would be talking non-stop anyway, whether there was a camera pointed at them or not.

Sandler's camera drifts from person to person, place to place, time period to time period. He spends some time with the drag queens at Wigstock '92, joins protestors of the Tompkins Square Park curfew (they chant "Fuck Giuliani!," a lot), and observes various subway happenings. New Yorkers can always find something to protest or boycott, and we see the notorious anti-consumerist street performer Reverend Billy promoting boycotts of the neighborhood Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.

There are flashes of 9/11 imagery throughout the first half of Brave New York's hour-ish running time, until that event takes over the second half of the film. Strangely, Sandler doesn't quite capture the strange atmosphere of the city in those first days and weeks following the attacks; instead of the poetic images that dominate the first half, he tends to let his interview subjects ramble on for too long on the subject of terrorism and America. There are some interesting insights, but the film could have benefitted from some tightening in the home stretch. It also could have done with a little less of Sandler's tinkering with shutter speed and other in-camera effects; these touches are sometimes effective, but sometimes merely amateurish.

Brave New York is occasionally aimless, but it is consistently fascinating--in its patience, voyeurism, and attentiveness to detail, it captures the real New York in a way that few films have (especially in its perfect closing shot). Some audiences may be put-off by its free-form structure and homemade feel, but it is a valuable document of a neighborhood that seems to be quietly slipping away.

Video:

Much of the full-frame image is very poor (sometimes on purpose); the film was clearly shot with a standard-def consumer video camera, and has the expected pixilation, grain, and aliasing (along with some more egregious offenses, like lines in the image from damaged tapes). It doesn't look terribly good, but it does feel aesthetically correct.

The 2.0 stereo mix is a bit below average as well, with most of the audio apparently coming from the camera microphone. But again, this is consistent with the homemade quality of the film; a 5.1 surround mix wouldn't make a hell of a lot of sense here. The bare-bones mix feels right, just don't use it to show off your system.

Two of Sandler's later, shorter documentaries are included as bonus features; both are interesting (and stylistically similar). The 2006 film SWAY, (34:10) is comprised entirely of subway images and audio, reportedly assembled from a decade's worth of underground shooting. There's very little in the way of dialogue, just occasional words and music; the aural focus is the train. SWAY is fascinating, voyeuristic, accurate, and entirely too long; as it passes the thirty-minute mark, you start to think you missed your stop. Worth a look, but hop off whenever you'd like.

His most recent montage doc, Subway to the Former East Village, (32:23) is comprised of more East Village street scenes, feeling like outtakes to (or an extension of) Brave New York. Sandler returns to Woodstock, checks back in with Reverend Billy, and so on. Its best sequence is the titular one, in which Sandler follows a young woman who remembers the old feel of the neighborhood into a yuppie-fied apartment building, which the pair takes in with horror.

Sandler's style--both structurally and aesthetically--takes some getting used to. But there's an intangible longing and beauty to his work, which nicely captures the feel of the city (though he occasionally overstays his welcome). Recommended, particularly for New Yorkers past and present.

Jason lives in New York. He holds an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU.