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.