Wedlock House: An Intercourse

Accomplished earlier work by Stan Brakhage in which his wife Jane and he play a young married couple experiencing the intimacies of marriage. Shot in black and white without any soundtrack, the film is made up brief shots in overlapping chronology of a young couple who secure their house--locking doors, closing windows, pulling drapes--to provide security for their private evening. There is a nonstop flow throughout every shot of the film, whether it comes from a gesture by the actors, a pan of the camera, motion from the swinging lights or the drift of cigarette smoke, that keeps the viewer's attention focused on the beauty of the small details as they are revealed moment by moment. The brief glimpses of nudity as the couple intertwine on their bed are presented in negative and give an x-ray glimpse of the forces that bring them together. More a depiction of Walt Whitman's "adhesiveness" than eroticism, the film shows just how quickly Brakhage had mastered the skills of making a successful art film.

Mixing explicit sexual material with ghost like imagery, "Wedlock House: An Intercourse" is like a cross between a porno and a haunted house film. The imagery is striking in its depiction of sexual matters, and extremely daring for a film that came out in the late 50's, underground or otherwise. The use of light in this film is both annoyingly repetitive and beautifully hypnotic in its own unique way. Brakhage really shows off his talent for experimental visuals here, but also his flaw of being tedious every now and then.

I would also like to point out that the lighting in this film reminded me of the lighting used in a scene from Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life". It seems like the films of Brakhage have highly influenced Malick's heavily stylized films severely, "The Tree of Life" in particular.

When Stan Brakhage made Wedlock House: An Intercourse in 1959 he had recently gotten married. Evidently he felt quite trapped by this commitment and he turned to his work for an outlet. The film starts with a detached yet graphic sex scene shown in negative. After a brief shot of this the camera zooms in and the sexual movements quickly become repetitive as the camera draws closer to the action until the body parts are no longer recognizable. By starting this film with the act of intercourse Brakhage emphasizes the sexual aspect of marriage. After the sex scene the screen goes almost entirely black; this darkness is only broken up by occasional glimpses of the man and woman illuminated by a roving light source like a flashlight. At this point the two look to be quite happy together. The image of their smiling faces is obscured by a curtain drawing closed. In the rest of the film the characters seem to be fairly grim as they move around the house closing and covering all portals to the outside world.

The house the man and woman (played by none other than the Brakhages themselves) are seen in represents their marriage and the way they close themselves off from the outside world is a visual expression of their new codependence. Once they've barricaded the house things begin to change. Both the man and the woman are often seen looking at their own reflections in the mirror; they're still caught up in themselves and it isn't easy for them to adjust to their new duties. Of course, the house continues to be dark for the most part with only occasional moments of fleeting illumination. The sexual act is repeated in much the same way as the first shots but it's no longer followed by an expression of bliss; the action that follows it is much the same as the action that proceeds it as even this facet of their relationships becomes as much a part of their banal routine as drinking coffee at the table. Still, the film doesn't portray their relationship as completely hopeless: occasionally the mirror gazing couple manages to catch sight of the other person in the background of the reflection signifying some possibility of an authentic and positive personal connection.

From a technical standpoint, the most important component of Wedlock House: An Intercourse is the lighting. The various light sources include the aforementioned roving flashlights, candles, and numerous reflecting surfaces including the mirrors and the metal part of an alarm clock. The light is further emphasized when it's obscured by white cigarette smoke and black candle smoke which are as often as not divorced from the context of their source. Brakhage's experiments with light are used to excellent effect to complement his depiction of the institution of marriage as a dark room with intermittent flickers of edifying light.

Silent, as is most of Brakhage's work. Negative images of a couple making love bookend various shots of each of the pair, often just sitting and looking into space (or presumably at each other). a mirror, a window.. Mostly they are in near total darkness, but then a light (flashlight) will light a face for a moment, to some degree, although there is often still swaths of shadow. There are also shots of a mysterious light, like a pair of glowing animal eyes in a dark room.

This is an examination of marriage, and the fragmentary nature of two people trying to know each other. It has an effectively disturbing and thought provoking mood. I can't say in 'enjoyed' it, and I felt like it got repetitious once I grasped it's basic, simple concept, but I did find it among the more emotion inducing of Brakhage's work, raising in me both feelings of sadness and creepy discomfort.

Early Stan Brakhage seems primarily an exercise in rejecting ingratiation so completely that one goes to the opposite extreme, deliberately antagonizing the viewer's senses. In Desistfilm it was the ears that got the brunt of the abuse, as Brakhage treated us to a bizarre, cochlea-splitting soundtrack produced by droning into a microphone in different keys, all on behalf of seven minutes of some beatniks sitting in a room picking their belly-buttons, lighting matches, building stacks of books like bored pre-schoolers. In Wedlock House, an Intercourse, Brakhage sets his sights on the eyes, eschewing sound entirely for a full-on assault on the visual cortex.

The subject-matter is the early married life of two young people, played by Brakhage and his charming wife Jane, but the visual approach is so far-out that we quickly forget this, and become pre-occupied with the strange, swirling effect produced by filming actors in a dark room while shining flashlights on their faces for a second at a time. What we see are snatches of activity: the couple lighting cigarettes off a candle (which is often the only fixed object in any of the shots), the Dead End Kid-looking Brakhage gazing into a mirror, the woman standing at a window. The effect is some mysterious tension, the sense of inexpressible anxieties. This slow-motion-strobe material is cut together with negative-images of Brakhage and his wife having sex, the sex becoming as abstract as the rest of the "action" but in a different way (the nervous separateness of the married couple in the flash-lit/smoke-veiled obscurity vs. the merging of their bodies into a silvery-blue oneness, or something like that).

Whatever Brakhage had in mind when he made the film, his ulterior motive is a rather subversive one - the deliberate reduction of visual information to a bare minimum. With typical cheek Brakhage forces us to glean what we can from his fleeting glimpses, his abstract, purposely de-eroticized sex, goading us into a level of concentration that causes our eyes to hurt and subsequently our brains. The result is an "experience," in the "modern art is all about creating an experience" sense. In this case the experience amounts to ten minutes of squinting your eyes trying to see what the director doesn't want you to see, namely everything.