In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, The Wages of Fear) began shooting a film with a simple concept. A husband (Serge Reggiani) is so pathologically jealous of his wife (Romy Schneider) that the black-and-white footage of their lives becomes expressively distorted with his color fantasies. Clouzot was going to use all kinds of wiggy avant-garde techniques (including the soundtrack), for which a lot of test footage was shot. When he received backing for an unlimited budget from Columbia Pictures, any chance of shooting the film quickly on a tight schedule seems to have gone out the window as Clouzot slowed down shooting and prolonged the experiments. Reggiani left the project and Clouzot had a heart attack, shutting down production after three weeks.

Later Claude Chabrol shot his own version of the script, L’Enfer (1994), a straightforward bore. On the evidence of the footage revealed in Serge Bromberg’s documentary, if Clouzot’s film had used half the wild techniques and tour-de-force photography on display, the film would have been a psychedelic benchmark on a level with 2001: A Space Odyssey. The shots of Schneider alone, whether “plain” or fantastically fetishized, are uncanny goddess material. Bromberg’s fascinating film relies on Clouzot’s footage and interviews with a several participants, plus a few enacted dialogues from the script.

Facets has released two DVDs of 21st Century Iranian films made by filmmakers who fought the law, and sometimes the law won. One is a reissue that they’re calling attention to because of the director’s struggles, and the other is new on DVD. It’s strangely consoling (except to those in jail) to know that art can get you into serious trouble.

The 2002 movie The Twilight (Gagooman), shot on video, is a documentary-like reconstruction of events with the real people playing themselves. (This has become something of a specialty in Iranian cinema, for example Close-Up and A Moment of Innocence.) It begins with the camera looking out through the windshield of a car on its way to some location, which may be intended to remind us of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry. The main character has lived in prison all his adult life, and now the warden arranges for him to marry a female prisoner, with his mother (also in prison!) acting as intermediary. These scenes are handled in a simple, even unprofessional fashion, accumulating details at a steady pace until we have a wedding (apparently the actual wedding footage, not re-enacted).

In France, aspiring sculptor Henri Gaudier meets aspiring writer Sophie Brzeska and the two of them live tempestuously if platonically until World War I. In line with his times, Ken Russell presents this story of artists as a celebration of anti-establishment rebels and misfits along the lines of A Fine Madness or Isadora or Russell’s own Debussy Film for the BBC. This long out-of-circulation movie at last arrives on disc as one of Warner Archives’ made-on-demand DVD-Rs.

Gaudier (Scott Antony) and Brzeska (Dorothy Tutin) are presented as something akin to pains in the ass who find sympathy in each other. Gaudier is especially raucous, even buffoonish, and always on the verge of a tiresomeness saved only by his handsome youth. The middle-aged Brzeska has no such refuge, and Russell presents a sharply etched portrait of the bohemian community of opportunistic dealers and arty types who like Gaudier better than the vulgar woman. The convincing atmosphere of pre-war France is presented with Russell’s eye for careful compositions in wide-angle lenses mixed with exuberant moving camerawork and flashy cutting.

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Want more salt on your fries? This movie shows how the salt got in your shaker, or at least how it used to get there. It’s not a pretty picture and yet, paradoxically, it’s a beautiful picture.

Margot Benacerraf’s Araya epitomizes a contradiction between social protest and lyricism in the field of ethnographic documentary. In 1957, Benacerraf was amazed to discover a remote corner of Venezuela where indigenous communities carried on as they had for centuries since the Spanish landing, harvesting salt from the beaches in order to maintain their tenuous balance of carefully exploited poverty. As her film follows three families over the course of a day (including a grandmother and grandchild who are actually unrelated), every frame stands as a cry and condemnation that this terrible way of life must change. At the same time, Giuseppe Nisoli’s ravishingly sharp black and white photography aestheticizes and idealizes the dignity and nobility of the people and their lifestyle that none of us would want. Some traditions don’t deserve to be preserved.