BD 59 The Cassandra Cat

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Kirkinson
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BD 59 The Cassandra Cat

#1 Post by Kirkinson » Mon Dec 12, 2005 3:21 am

Looks like Vojtech Jasny's Až přijde kocour (When the Cat Comes, but called Cassandra Cat when it was released in the USA) is coming to DVD in the Czech Republic: www.dvdr.cz (this web site apparently does deliver abroad, but I have no idea how much it costs).

Wonder of wonders, it appears as though it will have English subtitles! I found another web site that seems to list it as all-region PAL and 2.35:1. Even if the disc turned out to be mediocre, it would still be a vast improvement over the old USA VHS which was pan-and-scan and badly dubbed.

Does anyone else love this film as much as I do? Some of it does seem a little hokey sometimes, but I've never been able to discern whether that's the film itself or whether it's just the bad English dubbing that does it. At any rate, I think it's a great piece of work overall -- the scene in which the cat's glasses are first removed is one powerfully intoxicating moment. And I think the film as a whole also has great things to say about the importance of moral rebellion, and how little the values we are taught as children hold up in the world we enter as adults. (I guess in that sense I don't object to the concept of the English dub, as this is a film that can and certainly should be watched by children who are probably too young to keep up with subtitles...it's just that the dub they did back in the 60's was so bad.)

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Gordon
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 8:03 am

#2 Post by Gordon » Mon Dec 12, 2005 2:29 pm

Gasp! I love that movie. But I have never seen the original Czech version. It's a beautiful little parable - your comments sum up it very well. Visually, it must be stunning in its full 2.35:1 ratio. I am collector of Czech films, so this is great news.

My order at www.dvdr.cz came to 632.00 Koruny, which is about $26.

Zdenek Podskalský's wonderful, The White Lady (1965) is also available with subtitles here. Here's the IMDb listing.

There's lots of Jiří Menzel films with English subs available. Capricious Summer (1968) is a wonderfully whimsical and humourous film.

Brilliant scouting, Kirkinson! You've made my day!

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Kirkinson
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#3 Post by Kirkinson » Wed Jan 18, 2006 6:27 pm

Image vs. Image

It's not perfect, but it's still beautiful!

The print shows innumerable sings of age and wear, but nevertheless it is rendered wonderfully on the DVD. The image is sharp and crisp and the colors (so very important in this film) just fly off the screen. The image I posted above doesn't do it much justice. It's dark in that shot, yes, but there's no loss of detail (it looks much better full-size).

It's also anamorphically enhanced, so the only problem left with the image is that, as you can see above, it is somewhat vertically stretched. But after only being able to see the horrible pan-and-scan VHS until now, the DVD is still marvelous, even revelatory in comparison.

Audio comes in a superb, dynamic, crystal-clear 2.0 track that preserves the original soundtrack without any superfluous enhancements.

The English subs are pretty good. There are the few places where word choice is puzzling and you have to stop and think about what the translator meant to say, but overall it's easy to read. Punctuation is a bigger problem than grammar or vocabulary.

The extras are stacked with interviews with Vojtech Jasny, actress Emilia Vasaryova, and still photographer Karel Jesatko, as well as a period documentary about actor Jan Werich. Unfortunately none of these extras have subtitle options, and I don't speak a word of Czech. Oh well. There are also galleries of still photographs and tons of promotional material from the film's release, and some DVD-ROM stuff that gives you newspaper articles from the time (again, all in Czech).

However, the most remarkable thing about this DVD is the discovery that the film was not only dubbed for its American release, it was also truncated! The VHS runs 92 minutes, but this DVD runs 100. After adjusting for PAL speed-up, this suggests that there are around 12 minutes missing from the US release. I haven't watched the whole film yet, but I've already noticed some extra footage in Oliva's opening introduction to the town, a scene with Robert inside his home (where he cares for numerous animals), and another scene with the school director in a hallway prior to the first classroom scene. I don't know if this accounts for all the new footage yet, but I'm excited at the prospect of finding more that I haven't seen before.

The all-region PAL disc even played perfectly on my normal NTSC player with an old tube TV, so I recommend this film and the DVD to everyone. I can't sing its praises highly enough. I also give full points to http://www.dvdr.cz. The price was right (around $26 after shipping, as Gordon said) and the DVD arrived here less than two weeks after the DVD was released, as fast as I've ever received anything from overseas. Anyone even slightly interested should jump on this!

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Barmy
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#4 Post by Barmy » Thu Jan 19, 2006 1:30 pm

Thanks for starting this thread. This is very useful info. I've ordered the DVD.

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Gordon
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 8:03 am

#5 Post by Gordon » Thu Jan 19, 2006 8:48 pm

I concur wholeheartedly with Kirk's views on the disc! The sound really surprised me - if only all mono tracks of European films over 40 years old sound this great.

As for the story itself, it is simply sublime: vibrant; wistful; philosophical; beautiful; searching - the greatest fable that Aesop never wrote. It is in no way 'silly' - on the contrary, it may come across as wholly serious, but, as I say, in a wistful manner. Balzac would have loved it. The true natures of people are always well-hidden by masks of insincerity: "The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped", as Schopenhauer remarks; only rarely are the masks removed by the hand of the other, but in this tale, they are and by a paw no less! The cat has long been esteemed as a creature of great emotion-sensing powers of people and here it is drawn out to an extreme literal conclusion in a style that reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges short stories where weird paradoxes reveal great Truths. But it is a film that is - or was - 'sold' as a 'Childrens/Family' film, but for me, it drew my thinking deeper. The vengeance that the bitter adults try to reek on the cat is lightly done, but nevertheless highlights a facet of human behaviour that is all too true - the fear of Truth.

The cinematography and camera perspectives are amazing throughout. I now hold this film as one of the great colour films after seeing the full scope framing and proper colour values, which were both wrecked on the VHS tape. A shame that the interviews were not subtitled, though.

I hope that this film is distributed in the U.S. and the UK, as it deserves to be rediscovered and embraced as a masterpiece if Czech Cinema by one of their greatest filmmakers.

Joey

Re: Cassandra Cat/When the Cat Comes (V. Jasny, 1963)

#6 Post by Joey » Sun Jan 11, 2009 3:35 pm

We recently watched this movie and thoroughly enjoyed it. Does anyone know what city in the Czech Republic it was filmed in?

petoluk
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Re: Cassandra Cat/When the Cat Comes (V. Jasny, 1963)

#7 Post by petoluk » Sun Jan 11, 2009 4:40 pm

Joey wrote:We recently watched this movie and thoroughly enjoyed it. Does anyone know what city in the Czech Republic it was filmed in?
According to the "Czech Feature Film" bible (volume IV, 1961 - 1970), this was filmed in Telč...

Cheers! :wink:
Peto

Perkins Cobb
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Re: Cassandra Cat/When the Cat Comes (V. Jasny, 1963)

#8 Post by Perkins Cobb » Tue Jan 13, 2009 1:30 pm

If my already dimming memories of Jasny's comments at a screening of this film last year are accurate, Telč was his hometown and he chose to shoot the movie there out of a sense of nostalgia.

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LQ
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Re: Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (V. Jasny, 1963)

#9 Post by LQ » Tue Jan 13, 2009 1:46 pm

I've never heard of this film before but this thread, coupled with a few crazy-looking shots I found of the cat, was enough to drive me to order the dvd. Looking forward to watching it! Thanks to Joey for bumping this thread out of obscurity.

Bajaja
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Re: Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (V. Jasny, 1963)

#10 Post by Bajaja » Thu Jan 15, 2009 12:49 pm

FYI, Telč was also a location for Herzog's Woyzeck.

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L.A.
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Re: Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (V. Jasny, 1963)

#11 Post by L.A. » Thu Dec 31, 2020 6:44 am

On Facebook and Instagram they mentioned this being ”Back on screens in 2021.” Hopefully a Blu-ray will emerge.


PillowRock
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Re: The Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (Vojtěch Jasný, 1963)

#13 Post by PillowRock » Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:13 am

Wasn’t this on the list of 30-ish Czech titles that Criterion licensed some time back?

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dwk
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Re: The Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (Vojtěch Jasný, 1963)

#14 Post by dwk » Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:45 am

PillowRock wrote:
Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:13 am
Wasn’t this on the list of 30-ish Czech titles that Criterion licensed some time back?
Yes it was one of the titles.

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swo17
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Re: The Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (Vojtěch Jasný, 1963)

#15 Post by swo17 » Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:56 am


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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Cassandra Cat / When the Cat Comes (Vojtěch Jasný, 1963)

#16 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:57 pm

This was a relatively low-key and endearing exercise in igniting peripheral engagement with the sublime. A few posts upthread get at why this film is more profound than its surface-level pleasures might suggest, but I saw it as less of a comprehensive socially philosophical tale than a perversely charitable portrait of our narcissistic schemas, acknowledging the ways we can stretch the limits of our self-focus while still understandably existing within them. Sure, the whole town is subject to the process of unlocking parts of them that they block with rigidity in falsely-defined-as-inflexible and ‘true’ constructs, and the blind convictions of those dominant men in power who are threatened by change are cheekily illustrated as synonymous with the rest of the adult townsfolk's inflexibly-preoccupied conditions. Still, this film is so clearly 'about' Robert's awakening in particular, a man who requires a fantastical intrusion to support him in locating and sustaining a sobriety to valuable, vulnerable aspects of his ‘self’ that he previously kept hidden in the margins of his psyche. That the rest of the townspeople are mere players surrounding his central character, also subject to the same arousing context, only affirms an egocentric perspective that defensively disallows him to be alone in this experience, and effectively masks the desperation that led to such exotic and absurd details to be necessary in initiating the slightest change of attention.

Dense readings aside, the silent endless escapade of blossoming love is wonderfully idyllic, and the gags that occur as consequence of the rebellion's attempts to catch the cat are silly in the stupidest way, serving as a nice counterpoint to the romance and blasting this kind of impulsive reactiveness in the process. It's actually pretty timely.

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What A Disgrace
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Forthcoming: The Cassandra Cat

#17 Post by What A Disgrace » Fri Dec 02, 2022 9:27 am

Confirmed to be coming early 2023.

Calvin
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Re: The Cassandra Cat

#18 Post by Calvin » Fri Dec 02, 2022 3:48 pm

That's great news. I didn't manage to see the restoration at Il Cinema Ritrovata but I did attend talk on its restoration. Hopefully Second Run can include something on the subject as I remember it was quite interesting, with some differences in the audio tracks between distributed versions.

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Aunt Peg
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Re: The Cassandra Cat

#19 Post by Aunt Peg » Sat Dec 03, 2022 8:44 am

Well as a cat lover of epic proportions count me in for this.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: The Cassandra Cat

#20 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sat Dec 03, 2022 7:53 pm

I've got a Czech DVD of this that I bought in Brno, but I'm looking forward to SR releasing it.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Forthcoming: The Cassandra Cat

#21 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Dec 03, 2022 8:49 pm

We actually have a thread for this! Unless it's for a different film?

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MichaelB
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Re: Forthcoming: The Cassandra Cat

#22 Post by MichaelB » Sun Dec 04, 2022 5:53 am

The same one. In fact, I own that Czech DVD.

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Aunt Peg
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Re: Forthcoming: The Cassandra Cat

#23 Post by Aunt Peg » Tue Dec 13, 2022 9:04 am

This has just 'dropped' on MUBI (depending upon where one lives I assume).

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Aunt Peg
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Re: Forthcoming: The Cassandra Cat

#24 Post by Aunt Peg » Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:51 am

Just watched the film on MUBI and enjoyed immensely. Very typical of 60's Czech cinema.

The restoration was gorgeous and I'll definitely be adding the film to my Blu Ray collection.

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ryannichols7
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Re: Forthcoming: The Cassandra Cat

#25 Post by ryannichols7 » Mon Dec 19, 2022 8:30 am

20 February!

The Cassandra Cat (Až přijde kocour, 1963) presented from a new 2K restoration by the Czech National Film Archive.
• A Projection Booth audio commentary with Mike White, Spencer Parsons and Chris Stachiw.
• Badly Painted Hen (Špatně namalovaná slepice, 1963): the acclaimed animated short film by Jiří Brdečka, co-writer of The Cassandra Cat.
• Trailer
• Booklet featuring a new, expansive essay by author Cerise Howard.
• Original soundtrack remastered in 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio.
• New and improved English subtitle translation.
• World premiere on Blu-ray.
• Region Free (A/B/C) Blu-ray.

cover art:
SpoilerShow
Image

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