COTTON CANDY

Avant-garde master Ernie Gehrs first foray into DV is innocously titled Cotton Candy. He uses a mini-digital-recorder to look back on the Machine Age in the form of San Franciscos soon to-be-shuttered Musée Mécanique. For slightly less than an hour, Cotton Candy documents this venerable collection of coin-operated mechanical toys including an entire circus mainly in close-up, isolating particular details as he alternates between ambient and post-dubbed (or no) sound. By treating the Musées cast of synchronised figures as puppets, the artist is making a show but is it his or theirs? Gehrs selective take on the arcade renders it all the more spooky. The Musées assortment of space-bending, raucously interactive video games is shown only obliquely, and relatively late in the film. Gehr prefers to focus on the outmoded and archaic. Thus, he pays particular attention to the old-fashioned, hand-cranked photographic flip-books known as mutoscopes. Gehr has always been interested in the ephemeral, and Cotton Candy could well be his most preservationist film. Also the most epic. (Jim Hoberman)