MUBI is partnering with the New York Film Festival to present highlights from Projections, a festival program of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Dane Komljen's Fantasy Sentences (2017) is playing October 30 - November 29, 2017 in most countries around the world.
A girl and a man played a game. The man would say words. Words like freedom, garden, faded, greeting, crazy, eye of a needle. The girl would then form sentences. Sentences like Since freedom cannot be attained as quickly as the leaves in the garden have faded, its greeting is all the stormier and even the crazy people, who believe the eye of a needle to be larger than a monkey, take part. What she came up with was less about creating a meaning, more about creating a space where none of what she was given to play with was left out. She was foraging for links and intervals. One could hear it on the radio. His name was Walter, hers remained unknown, the name of the game was "Fantasy Sentences." When thinking about history, I wonder if one often feels like that girl, trying to extract some sense out of the impermanence. And so another game begins: how does a child remember, how does a horse do it, how does a tree?
