R.I.P. Patrice Chéreau: A Great, Under-Appreciated French Filmmaker

One of French cinema's finest directors, Patrice Chéreau, died yesterday at the age of 68. Famous as a writer and director of both the screen and the stage, Chéreau made his film debut in 1975 with The Flesh of the Orchid (La chair de l'orchidée), an adaptation of British mystery author James Hadley Chase's sequel to No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The film starred Charlotte Rampling, Simone Signoret, Edwige Feuillère, Bruno Cremer, and Hugues Quester. Chéreau would subsequently re-team with Signoret in 1978 for his next feature, Judith Therpauve. He would come to prominence in the international film circuit with this third film in 1983, L'homme blessé, a gritty, sexually explicit tale of an eighteen-year-old boy (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and his infatuation with a drug-addicted hustler (Vittorio Mezzogiorno). Premiering in competition at Cannes that year, L'homme blessé launched the career of Anglade, who would work with Chéreau again in Queen Margot and Persécution, and awarded Chéreau and his co-writer Hervé Guibert the César for Best Original Screenplay.

His next film, Hôtel de France—which starred Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Vincent Perez, Marianne Denicourt, Agnès Jaoui, and Bruno Todeschini among others—played in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1987, followed by Chéreau's participation in the Amnesty International-funded omnibus feature Contre l'oubli (Lest We Forget), alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman, and several others. His best-known film, Queen Margot (La reine Margot), played in competition at Cannes in 1994, winning the Jury Prize as well as the Best Actress prize for Virna Lisi. The lavish, violent costume drama was nominated for an Academy Award for costume design, a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and received Césars for cinematography, costume design, and for three of its cast members: Isabelle Adjani, Jean-Hugues Anglade, and Lisi.

Chéreau returned to his queer roots in 1998 with the splendid Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, an ensemble film surrounding the funeral of a beloved painter (Jean-Louis Trintignant). The film also starred Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Vincent Perez, Pascal Greggory, Charles Berling, Bruno Todeschini, Roschdy Zem, and Dominique Blanc. Césars were given to Blanc for Supporting Actress, Éric Gauthier for Cinematography, and Chéreau for Direction. Chéreau made his English-language debut in 2001 with the controversial Intimacy, one of the first mainstream, English-language films in to feature unsimulated sex between its two leads, Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox. The film, which was based on the writings of Hanif Kureishi and also starred Marianne Faithfull and Timothy Spall, won the coveted Golden Bear at the Berlinale. He would again find himself on the award podium at the Berlinale two years later, winning the Best Director prize for his wonderful Son frère. Son frère featured Bruno Todeschini, who had co-starred in several of Chéreau's earlier films, and Éric Caravaca as a pair of estranged brothers who are brought back together when the elder, Thomas (Todeschini), is diagnosed with a deadly disease.

Both of his last two films, Gabrielle and Persécution, would compete at the Venice Film Festival, in 2005 and 2009 respectively. Chéreau and his frequent writing collaborator, Anne-Louise Trividic, adapted Gabrielle from a short story by Joseph Conrad. The film featured Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory as a couple whose seemingly happy marriage dissolved when Huppert leaves Greggory a letter on their tenth anniversary announcing that she's leaving to be with another lover . Chéreau's final film, Persécution, starred Romain Duris as an unhappy man with a distant girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose life gets shaken up by a mysterious stranger (Jean-Hugues Anglade) who claims to be in love with him.

In addition to being a great director of actors, Chéreau, too, acted in a number of notable films, including Andrzej Wajda's Danton, Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans, and Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac. He also played Napoléon in Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte and provided the voice of Marcel Proust in Raúl Ruiz's Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé). His last appearance onscreen was in Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup), memorably sparring with his wife, played by Béatrice Dalle.

Though his many accolades may suggest otherwise, I've always felt that Chéreau was rather undervalued in the world of cinema. As a director, Chéreau had a truly uncompromising vision. From the dark tunnels of L'homme blessé, the impossible red bloodshed in Queen Margot, the shadowy interiors of the taken train and its inhabitants in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, the sea-swept blueness—literal and otherwise—of Son frère, the grainy floorboards and the stains of sex in Intimacy, and the mood-lit sets of Gabrielle, each of his films burned a deep impression in my memory. All of his films (at least those that I've seen) challenged the audience in unexpected ways, and none of them were the least bit easy to swallow. I admired that about his films, how no matter how prepared I thought I was for what I was about to see, he was always giving me something more, something different, or something unexpected. I'm pretty sure my liking of every single one of his films came in hindsight, or in my inability to shake any of his work for weeks after. His explorations of darkness were always rewarding. He will be missed.

The San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now, 2013

The San Francisco Film Society announced the line-up for their annual French Cinema Now program, which—as its name suggests—features a selection of Gallic films released within the past year. This year's program contains my personal favorite film of 2013 (so far, at least), Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake (L'inconnu du lac). Winner of both the Directing Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and the Queer Palm, the film is a haunting, erotic mystery of sorts, set entirely on the gay cruising grounds surrounding a secluded lake. Another of the notable films of the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes this year, Claire Denis' Bastards (Les salauds), will close out the four-day affair, on November 10th. Bastards stars Chiara Mastroianni and Lola Créton alongside a number of Denis regulars, including Michel Subor, Vincent Lindon, Grégoire Colin, Alex Descas, and Florence Loiret Caille.

French Cinema Now opens on November 7th at the Clay Theater with Sébastien Betbeder's 2 Autumns, 3 Winters (2 automnes, 3 hivers), which stars Vincent Macaigne, Maud Wyler, and Bastien Bouillon as a trio of individuals whose lives begin to intersect following a pair of catastrophes. Also on the 7th, there's the the third directorial outing for actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, A Castle in Italy (Un château en Italie). Like her previous films, this semi-autobiographical yarn, which premiered in competition at Cannes back in May, follows a woman played by Bruni-Tedeschi and her Italo-French family. Her real-life partner, Louis Garrel, co-stars with Filippo Timi, Xavier Beauvois, Céline Sallette, and Omar Sharif (in a cameo as himself).

Two additional Cannes leftovers will also screen: Arnaud des Pallières' period epic Michael Kohlhaas, which played in competition and stars Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen in the title role, and Katell Quillévéré's Suzanne, which played at the Semaine de la critique. Starring Sara Forestier, Adèle Haenel, and François Damiens, Suzanne is Quillévéré's second feature, following Love Like Poison (Un poison violent) in 2010.

Rounding out the selection: Anna Novion's road flick Rendezvous in Kiruna (Rendez-vous à Kiruna), with Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Anastasios Soulis; Axelle Ropert's Miss and the Doctors (Tirez la langue, mademoiselle), starring Louise Bourgoin; Nicolas Philibert's documentary House of Radio (La maison de la radio); and a French-Canadian flick for good measure… Denis Côté's Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (Vic+Flo ont vu un ours), which premiered in competition in February at the Berlinale. The 2013 French Cinema Now showcase runs from 7-10 November at the Clay Theater. See you there.

Creating Your Own Picture Story in Art Trash

Tropic of Cancer

(Al tropico del cancro)

1972, Italy

Giampaolo Lomi, Edoardo Mulargia

Often times, when I'm working from home, I throw something on the television to half-watch, depending on the task. Upon the recommendation of a horror aficionado friend of mine, I decided upon a giallo film called Tropic of Cancer (Al tropic del cancro)—no relation, as far as I could tell, to the Henry Miller novel—and marveled at what I saw. Mind you, I was listening to music on my headphones and fiddling on the Internet at the same time. With no knowledge of what was supposed to be transpiring in the film (and, most importantly, no desire to find out), I was hypnotized by its vulgar beauty. With a bit of creative invention on a few of the details, some of the highlights of Tropic of Cancer are the following: exquisitely arranged dream/fantasy sequences in which a fake-breasted blonde, vaguely resembling Linda Evans, runs slow-motion through a red hallway (in the direction of the sexy, hair-tosselling fan on set, it would seem) while naked black men reach out to grab her (her perfect hammy/beautiful look of terror is utilized several times in the film with Mario Bava-esque zooms); a curly-haired, baby-faced Porky the Pig döppelganger–fey in the sort of way that was befitting of villains in cinema once upon a time–getting a massage from his virile, young, native servant while a white teenage boy sheds his towel to dive into a pool filled of giant blocks of ice, cut against shots of two gorgeous agitated peacocks; a mustached Jack Palace lookalike wearing a see-through blouse getting Nancy Kerrigan-ed by The Invisible Woman while sitting on a deckchair; a strange macho rivalry between two hunky Italian men that are barely distinguishable from one another (intentional? I'm not sure), trying to win the affections of the fake-breasted white lady, spying on one another making passionate love to her; frenzied native dances that turn into frenzied native orgies as the white folk look on; the bizarre murderous ends for both Porky the Pig, speared in the mud like a swine, and Jack Palance, face burned off in a mine; and a voodoo spiritual involving a woman I imagine to be the wild voodoo priestess holding a giant bucket over her head while the natives dance around a naked couple in shackles in either a wedding ceremony or a murder ritual. Do these sort of art trash films get made any more? If so, where? And if not, what has replaced them? There's a void in the world of cinema when art and trash have to exist separately. I feel it would only spoil the fun I had by actually watching the film, so I put together a photo series for Giampaolo Lomi and Edoardo Mulargia's Tropic of Cancer for your viewing pleasure.

With: Anthony Steffen, Anita Strindberg, Gabriele Tinti, Umberto Raho, Stelio Candelli, Gordon Felio, Kathryn Witt, Alfio Nicolosi, Bob Lemoine, Pierre Richard Merceron, Fred Ade

Love and Death; or How to Find Yourself Crazed on the Streets of San Francisco

Blue Jasmine

2013, USA

Woody Allen

Sometime in the 1980s or possibly the early 1990s, Woody Allen shifted from being a "sure bet" to a "mixed bag." Some people might attest that the process of aging and its effects to the body and mind can account for the sort of decline we sometimes see in artists' work during their later years. I'm not sure we'll ever know what, if anything, is to blame, but somewhere after Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen's films started missing their mark; perhaps it was shortly after Allen's messy divorce with the second major muse of his career, Mia Farrow. At the rate of nearly a film per year, it's to be expected that not every one would succeed, though a few of the films (that I've seen) that came after Farrow reached the heights of his early greats (Deconstructing Harry, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Bullets Over Broadway, possibly Mighty Aphrodite).

Allen may have seen enormous success with his 2011 outing Midnight in Paris, which awarded the filmmaker his first Academy Award in twenty-five years and went on to be the most profitable film of his career. Despite these accomplishments, Midnight in Paris brought me to make the claim that I had given up on any further projects the director had left in him. It wasn't just that I disliked the film; it made me want to go to Home Depot, buy a bunch of lightbulbs, and smash them in the parking lot. There were other things going on in my life that might have amplified the violence I felt, but my hatred was genuine. With Blue Jasmine however, the fact that I even considered seeing it was the first indication of how premature the bullheaded proclamation I made was. Blue Jasmine is almost good enough to have erased the memory of grumbling, cringing, and sighing my way through Owen Wilson's magically tedious tour of Parisian history. Almost.

The first thing about Blue Jasmine that should be mentioned—as it has been by nearly every person I know who's seen it—is its star, Cate Blanchett. As most of us are aware, she ranks among a very small list of actresses in Hollywood today who can always be counted on to be somewhere near wonderful, no matter how good or bad the film the film she's in might be. As Jasmine, née Jeanette, Blanchett's performance is the sort of thing to elicit the most enthusiastic of gay squeals. She embodies all of the things that make the gays melt in their theatre chairs. She's beautiful, unbalanced, reeling from a tragic marriage, mentally unstable, alcohol and pill dependent, viper-tongued, and oblivious to her own absurdity, all while traveling down a road that dances on the ultra-thin line that separates redemption from degradation. Oh, and she also has a really expensive wardrobe. But it's not the character alone that would make the gays extend the vowel sounds in the word "amazing" while describing the film, it's Blanchett's possession of Jasmine that makes it so outstanding.

Ostensibly an update of A Streetcar Named Desire set during our current economic crisis, the film begins with Jasmine's relocation to San Francisco to move in with her sister Ginger (a wonderful-as-usual Sally Hawkins) after losing all of her money and possessions to the government after her wealthy businessman husband (Alec Baldwin) is arrested for fraud. She's clearly on a downward spiral, but it's unclear how close to rock bottom she actually is… or if there even is a bottom to land on. It takes a while into the film before one begins to recognize the weight of the drama at hand, as Blue Jasmine isn't drenched in the sort of stark Bergman-esque tone of Interiors.

Handling the film with a light touch and taking his time to expose the severity of Jasmine's situation, Allen turns Blue Jasmine into a much darker Midnight in Paris, exploring the wounded psyche of his protagonist. He cuts between Jasmine's life in San Francisco and her life of privilege in the Hamptons, slowly unveiling the fact that what initially appear to be flashbacks are actually scenes of Jasmine's life that she's reliving and replaying. When you realize that you're seeing what's happening in Jasmine's head, you begin to see all of her fears of appearance, gossip, and other people's judgments reaffirm themselves. Though she never explicitly acknowledges these fears (looking the other way is one of her specialties), the film tells us that everyone around Jasmine knows exactly what's going on in her life and that it's a pretty hot discussion topic. An early scene where Jasmine is at the airport talking all about herself to the unlucky old woman seated next to her really struck me as the camera veers away from Jasmine at the baggage claim to capture a brief dialogue exchange between the old woman and her husband about the "strange woman" hollering goodbye to her. Throughout the film, it appears that everyone else is privy to intimate details of the sordid life of her husband, as well as Jasmine's own shaky mental state, though this too could be all in Jasmine's head. It's almost as if the truth about Jasmine's life exists everywhere but in her own delusional mind.

For anyone who has spent any time in San Francisco, Jasmine's fate at the end of the film has a sobering ring of truth to it. A friend remarked after seeing the film that he had to suspend disbelief when people on the street stop to watch Jasmine have a breakdown outside the dentist's office, because such outward displays of crazy are so commonplace in San Francisco that few would have taken much notice. Granted, it isn't every day one sees that sort of eruption from someone who looks like Cate Blanchett. I don't believe one needs to have lived in San Francisco to be haunted by the closing scene, but for those who have, it certainly provides an extra layer of bleakness to the experience. I guess Allen will never cease to be on my radar, and I'm okay with that.

Though we didn't feel the same way, I highly recommend that you read Jonathan Rosenbaum's assessment of Blue Jasmine and Allen's class obsession.

With: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Sarsgaard, Louis C.K., Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Stuhlbarg, Max Casella, Alden Ehrenreich, Tammy Blanchard, Joy Carlin, Richard Conti

A Guide to the 66th Locarno International Film Festival, 2013

After a short two month break following Cannes, the major film festival season begun again this week with the 66th Locarno Film Festival, which is the first in a quick succession of major premiere festivals in the autumn of each year followed closely by San Sebastián, Venice, and Toronto chronologically. In addition to those top tier festivals, there are a handful of other notable premiere fests that will be starting soon, including the Festival des Films du Monde in Montréal, the Tokyo International Film Festival, and the Torino Film Festival. Locarno opened with the latest Hollywood crime film from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, 2 Guns, with Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington.

There are two main competitions that take place at Locarno: the Concorso Internazionale (International Competition) and the Concorso Cineasti del Presente ("Filmmakers of the Present" Competition for emerging filmmakers). Last year, the top prize of the Concorso Internazionale, the Golden Leopard, went to a surprise choice, Jean-Claude Brisseau's La fille de nulle part (The Girl from Nowhere). Pedro González-Rubio (Alamar) won the Golden Leopard in the Cineasti del Presente section with his documentary/narrative Inori. This year, the Concorso Internazionale features a mix of films from some major figures in Asian cinema as well as a few burgeoning auteurs.

You can access the full line-up for the Concorso Internazionale through Locarno's website, as I'm trying to steer clear of unnecessary list-making these days. The competition features the latest work from Shinji Aoyama (Eureka), Joanna Hogg (Unrelated), Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani (Amer), Albert Serra (Birdsong), Thomas Imbach (I Was a Swiss Banker), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata), Júlio Bressane (Killed the Family and Went to the Movies), Emmanuel Mouret (Shall We Kiss?), Guillaume Brac (A World Without Women), Daniel & Diego Vega (October), David Wnendt (Combat Girls), Chang Tso-chi (When Love Comes), Pippo Delbono (La paura), Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucci (Oh! Uomo), Joaquim Pinto (Twin Flames), Yves Yersin (Les petites fugues), and Hong Sang-soo, who will be presenting his second film of 2013 at the festival after Nobody's Daughter Hae-Won played in competition at the Berlinale. The only American film competing this year is Destin Cretton's Short Term 12, an expansion of his Sundance prize-winning 2008 short of the same name; Short Term 12 won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at this year's SXSW Film Festival.

While several of the competition films have piqued my interest, there are two that top my list: Corneliu Porumboiu's When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Când se lasă seara peste Bucureşti sau metabolism) and Claire Simon's Gare du Nord. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is writer/director Porumboiu's first film following the international acclaim of Police, Adjective (Poliţist, adjective) in 2009—though he did co-write the screenplay with director Igor Cobileanski for The Unsaved (La limita de jos a cerului), which played in the East of the West Competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this past summer. Porumboiu's latest follows the exploits of a movie director (played by Bogdan Dumitrache, who won the Best Actor prize for the film The Best Intentions at Locarno in 2011) whose affair with one the actresses begins to disrupt the film shoot. In Gare du Nord, four strangers–played by Nicole Garcia, Reda Kateb (A Prophet), François Damiens (The Wolberg Family), and Monia Chokri (Heartbeats)–find casual encounters in the famous Parisian train station. The extensive ensemble cast also includes my biggest crush of the year, Christophe Paou from Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake (L'innconu du lac), Lou Castel, Samir Guesmi, Jean-Christophe Bouvet, André Marcon, Ophélia Kolb, and Jacques Nolot. Simon's sadly overlooked previous film, God's Offices (Les bureaux de Dieu), also utilized an enormous cast (including Emmanuel Mouret, whose new film is also in competition) in a single location, with Garcia again at the center of the picture. Additionally, Simon also has a documentary called Human Geography (Géographie humaine) screening at the festival out of competition that almost sounds like a non-fiction version of Gare du Nord.

As I don't have much to reference regarding the Concorso Cineasti del Presente, I'll instead focus on some of the other notable films playing and/or premiering at Locarno this year. Following winning turns in Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires) and Laurence Anyways, Canadian actress Monia Chokri, who can be seen in Gare du Nord, makes her directorial debut with the short An Extraordinary Person (Quelqu'un d'extraordinaire), which co-stars another Dolan regular, Anne Dorval. In the Piazza Grande section, you'll find the latest comedy from director Sam Garbarski (Irina Palm), Vijay and I, which stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Patricia Arquette, Michael Imperioli, Moni Moshonov, and Hanna Schygulla; cult French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux's black comedy Wrong Cops, which re-teams Laura Palmer's parents Grace Zabriskie and Ray Wise alongside Marilyn Manson, Eric Wareheim, and Jack Plotnick; a May-December Parisian romance between Michael Caine and Clémence Poésy in Sandra Nettelbeck's Mr. Morgan's Last Love, which also stars Gillian Anderson, Jane Alexander, and Justin Kirk; Jeremy Saulnier's acclaimed thriller Blue Ruin, which won the FIPRESCI Prize for the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes this year; Sebastián Leilo's Gloria, the Best Actress winner (Paulina García) at this year's Berlinale, which will be playing soon at both the San Sebastián and Toronto Film Festivals; and the latest film from Swiss director Lionel Baier (Garçon stupide), Longwave (Les grandes ondes (à l'ouest)), a road movie/comedy with Valérie Donzelli and Michel Vuillermoz.

Two new shorts from directors João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, Mahjong and The King's Body (O Corpo de Afonso), will screen at the festival. The directors' previous feature The Last Time I Saw Macao (A Última Vez Que Vi Macau) played in the Concorso Internazionale last year. An experimental documentary co-directed by acclaimed filmmakers Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, will also play out of competition, alongside Que d'amour, the new film by director Valérie Donzelli, and How to Disappear Completely, the latest from Philippine director Raya Martin. In a special section highlighting the work some of the festival's jury members work, there will be a screening of the president of the Concorso Internazionale jury Lav Diaz's film Norte, the End of History, which played at in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes earlier this year. There will also be a complete retrospective of the films of George Cukor at the festival, and it's always worth taking a look at their annual Open Doors section, which assists filmmakers in nations where funding can be difficult, as well as showing a selection of films from the particular region. This year, the focus is on the Southern Caucasus, highlighting films from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Expect some more festival guides to pop up on the blog over the next two months.

Voluptuous Horror: RIP Karen Black

The world lost one of its shining stars yesterday, as legendary actress Karen Black died following a long battle with cancer. An actress with a look that was just as striking as her presence, Black saw her career take off at the very beginning of the 1970s after co-starring in Dennis Hopper's iconic Easy Rider and Bob Rafelson's stunning Five Easy Pieces, which garnered the actress an Academy Award nomination as well as the first of her two Golden Globes wins. Her other Golden Globe win came four years later for Jack Clayton's adaptation of The Great Gatsby, in which she played Myrtle Wilson. The '70s were a particularly lucrative decade for Black, who also appeared in Jack Nicholson's directorial debut Drive, He Said, John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust, Robert Altman's Nashville, Dan Curtis' Burnt Offerings (as well as Curtis' cult TV movie, Trilogy of Terror), Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (his final film), Jack Smight's Airport 1975, and Peter Hyams' Capricorn One.

Black brought her talents as a stage actress to the screen as well, reprising her role in Altman's film adaptation of Ed Graczyk's play Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, alongside her Broadway co-stars Cher and Sandy Dennis. From the 1980s on, Black's film career comprised of a number of cultish oddities, of the horror ilk (Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars, David Winters' The Last Horror Film–playing herself, Alex Cox's Repo Chick, and Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses) and the arthouse variety, starring in a pair of films from directors Lynn Hershman-Leeson (Conceiving Ada, Teknolust) and Henry Jaglom (Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Irene in Time). She also had cameos, playing herself, in Altman's The Player and in the TV mini-series version of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. Black's presence as something of a gay icon for queer movie lovers lead to a number of supporting roles in low-budget, American LBGT films, like Todd Stephens' Gypsy 83, Tag Purvis' Red Dirt, Steve Balderson's Stuck!, and a few others not worth mentioning.

In addition to acting, Black was also a gifted singer and songwriter, which carried over into a number of her film roles (Nashville, Gypsy 83, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?). In the music world, performance artist Kembra Pfahler named her band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black after the actress. Pfahler herself posted a few photos to her Instagram page yesterday regarding Black's passing. Musician Cass McCombs featured Black on vocals on the song "Dreams Come True Girl," off his 2009 album Catacombs; she also appeared in the music video for the song. The two are pictured above. Karen Black, you will be forever missed.