When The Cassandra Cat by Vojteˇch Jasný was discovered by the 1963 IFF in Cannes, it was accepted as one of the major events of the festival’s 16th year. Although it did not receive the main award (the Palme d’Or went to Visconti’s The Leopard), the film obtained three prizes altogether, including the Technical Grand Prize. The name of Vojteˇch Jasný was not unknown to the Cannes festival. He had already competed in 1959 with Touha (Desire), an anthology film where discrete stories thematically correspond to the four seasons. While this ‘quartet from human life’ was shot in Academy format black and white, The Cassandra Cat was Jasný’s first widescreen color film. He used color not in order to create a mechanical imitation of reality, but to endow reality with new meaning and amplify the statement of the whole work. The very genre of the film encouraged such a treatment – a modern fairy tale with components of satire and parable. The key ‘character’ is a magical cat, whose gaze causes people to change color according to their attributes and actions. Liars become violet, thieves are grey, unfaithful people are yellow and those in love become red. At the time of the film’s original release, both general audiences and professionals assumed the colorization was produced through laboratory processing. But that was only partially true. The perfection of the trick was achieved through the actors’ clothing and masking as well as Jaroslav Kucˇera’s camerawork. His artistry is also visible in less spectacular scenes, where he underlines the beauty of the Czech countryside and the photogenic grace of the town of Telcˇ (whose Renaissance-era historic center is on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites). With this film, Jasný confirmed his stature as a lyricist, combining his childhood experience with an allegory of society. The ensemble of distinguished Czechoslovak actors is dominated by Jan Werich in a dual role – as both the castellan/narrator of the story and the magician/owner of the magical cat. In the civic life of the period, he stood out as a moral authority and a nuisance to the totalitarian regime.

Tomáš Hála