^{A still from Marie Jager’s 12-minute 2006 collage film The Purple Cloud.}

Jen Graves’s latest In/Visible podcast is online now. She talks with contemporary film artist Marie Jager, and she points us toward a screening tonight curated by Jager:

At 8:00 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, May 23, as part of the Henry’s “Artist’s Cinema” series at Northwest Film Forum, the L.A. artist offers a glimpse of her influences by choosing historic films and contemporary works for a two-hour program of short films that share “a profound wonder of both nature and absurd fictional premises” (the roster includes Dudley Murphy’s The Soul of the Cypress [1920], Jean Painleve’s The Love Life of the Octopus [1965], Jack Goldstein’s 46-second film Butterflies [1975], Dr. Jean Comandon’s The Movement of Plants [1927], At the Winter Sea Ice Camp [part of the National Film Board of Canada’s Netsilik Eskimo series], and Jean Rouch’s Mad Masters from 1956).

This also is your chance to see Jager’s Purple Cloud on a big screen in a dark room (the little screen at the entryway to the Henry is slightly window-addled). It’s a three-part work presenting fragments of the book’s narrative, moving from gemstones in deserts to tomb boats at sea to a city of doomed survivors who’ve only escaped the stalking of the toxic purple cloud temporarily.