Queer Dream Triptych (Nightmare Version)2024

“Frames from Donald Fox's psychedelic Omega  (1970)—that ‘deals with the death and rebirth of mankind’—are newly suffused with a poem written by the filmmaker during a period of personal transformation related to sexuality, chronic illness, familial trauma, and queer ancestry.” —MIX NYC

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Queer Dream Triptych combines my original poem "Queer Dream Triptych" (first published in Yes Poetry on July 27, 2020) and found footage from Donald Fox's 1970 film Omega, which is in the public domain. The poem was conceived during a period of personal transformation as it related to my sexuality, chronic illness, familial trauma, and queer ancestry.

This "Nightmare Version" further digitally manipulates the color scheme in Fox's original footage, as well as the accompanying soundscape.

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My approach to Queer Dream Triptych was inspired by Lynne Sachs' 2005 film Atalanta: 32 Years Later. In that film, Sachs re-edited animated footage from a fairytale episode that aired on Marlo Thomas' 1970s feminist children's TV program Free to Be You and Me. Sachs distorted the episode's original audio to make it unintelligible, and then wrote new dialogue (which appeared in caption form over the scrambled found footage) that transformed the episode's narrative of a princess falling in love with a prince into a lesbian love story. (Sachs dedicated the film to pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer).

It is in this spirit that I have reworked Donald Fox's psychedelic 16mm footage from his 1970 film Omega into a queer dreamscape. After manipulating the chronology and duration of Fox's footage, I distorted the film's original soundscape by mixing it with new audio of my voice reciting my poem in reverse. Subsequently, I superimposed the text of my poem onto the new edit of Fox's film, thereby suffusing his images with new (queer) meaning and employing them as a filmic vessel through which to explicate the emotional underpinnings of my writing. —Matt McKinzie