Adrift on the Sea of Matrimony

Filmforum presents “June Weddings: Six Matrimonial Shorts,” an amusing yet thoughtful offering in keeping with the season, tonight at 8 at LACE.

Opening the program is Stan Brakhage’s lyrical 1959 “Wedlock: An Intercourse,” shot in the early months of his marriage and expressing the mystery, power and beauty of the onslaught of love in all its passion and tenderness.

Ironically, the next film, Steve Anderson’s “With/out Regret(s),” opens with the filmmaker commenting to his fiancee that Brakhage’s marriage eventually ended in divorce. Anderson intercuts video footage of himself and his fiancee discussing getting married with filmed segments of various people reading passages from literature on the subject of marriage; the effect is to suggest the complexity of the institution itself in the light of wrenching social changes.

Jeff Kreines and Tom Palazollo’s “Ricky and Rocky” was terrific when they made it 20 years ago, and it’s better than ever, a documentary on a blue-collar wedding shower that’s full of warm good will and without a trace of condescension.

Cathy Cook and Claudia Looze take an amusingly satirical tack on the traditional wedding and its preparations to suggest how its meaning is at odds with the realities of marriage in “June Brides”; at one point, the film’s two brides mow the lawn (along with other household duties).

In “First Comes Love,” Su Friedrichs cuts between four lavish, joyous wedding ceremonies; halfway through her film she lists all the countries that ban homosexual marriage--at the end she notes that in 1990 Denmark became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages.

Completing the program is David Jensen’s “Marriageable,” which was unavailable for preview. Information: (213) 663-9568.