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Section: Special Mention

Jan Kříženecký - A Pioneer of Czech Cinema (0) 12

A Pioneer of Czech Cinema Jan Kříženecký Commentary zone In its eighth anniversary, the National Film Archive will also commemorate 150 years since the birth of Jan Kříženecký, a pioneer of Czech cinema. The set of this person's digitized films, accompanied by commentary, has taken several years of work to complete and collate. Both original camera negatives and original copies and other media were digitized. The first films created on our territory can thus be presented in a form that emphasizes their variety and materiality. The musical accompaniment to the film set was created by Jan Burian Jr. Jan Kříženecký (March 20, 1868 - February 9, 1921) was a Czech film director, a cinematographer, a businessman and a photographer – by trade an engineer. He began getting interested in film in the autumn of 1896, when he first saw the film works of the Lumière brothers at the hotel U Saského Dvora. In 1898, during the Exhibition of Architecture and Engineering in Prague, he and his colleague Josef František Pokorný bought a cinematographic apparatus and film material. With this equipment, Kříženecký made the first Czech films, which he presented at the Czech Cinemas Pavilion at the Exhibition. Screenings of life in Prague and the first live-acted films with Josef Šváb-Malostranský were shown here. Kříženecký continued in film production but, due to the obligations of permanent employment, only temporarily. He later filmed the live-acted film interlude for the theater performance The Best Number (1902), extensive reportage of the IV. and V. All-Sokol Rally (1901, 1907), and various news from the Jubilee Exhibition of the Chamber of Commerce and Trade in 1908. His last extant film, dedicated to the monument to František Palacký, was completed in 1911. In addition to cinematographic achievements, Jan Krizenecky was also known as a photographer. He took thousands of photographs of Prague between 1902 and 1915.