Reportedly, the Czech National Film Archive is going to be putting some of its silent film collection online for free beginning 8 April and to June, including films of Jan Krízenecký on the 22nd of April, so I figured I should get a head start and watch the collection of Jan Krízenecký's oeuvre on home video from the Archive that I already own. It seems he's celebrated as the country's first native filmmaker and exhibitor--purchasing a Cinématographe a couple years after Lumière came to town and exhibiting his own films as early as at the Exhibition of Architecture and Engineering at the Prague Exhibition Grounds 15 June through 15 October of 1898. Like the Lumières and other early cinematographers (Eadweard Muybridge, Ottomar Anschütz, William K. L. Dickson, etc.), he was already established in the still photography business when film rolled around, and that's evident in his surviving motion pictures.Just look at this otherwise ordinary actuality film from 1898, "Midsummer Pilgrimage in a Czechoslavic Village." No amateur approaching the novel art form would manage to frame such wide and diverse action of a fairground so remarkably. There's a lot going on in under a minute runtime here, and it's all in relative focus. There's the merry-go-round in the background, flags blowing in the wind in the middle plane, dancing couples closer to the camera, beside what appears might be some kind of acrobatic practice and the crowds around them that form up towards the composition's foreground. Considering the goal of many early films in the novelty phase of cinema was to merely display figures in motion, this is a successful movie.On the Archive's home video collection, they present two prints, one vintage, which is tinted and features a good deal of scratches and other signs of wear from its exhibition, and the other the original negative, which is black-and-white and evidently not as worn out. There are several other early actualities included in the collection, including a swimming scene that was apparently projected backwards, à la the Lumière "Démolition d'un mur" (1896), to comedic effect. And, I'll talk about Krízenecký's early fiction films in my review of "Dostavenícko ve mlýnici" (An Assignation in the Mill) (1898).As for the Czech Film Archive, it's a world treasure for silent film preservation. Not only for its own national cinematic heritage, but also for foreign films, particularly Hollywood releases. As David Pierce's research ("The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929") demonstrates, of the minority of films that do survive from that period, most of them weren't because they were preserved by the studio that made them, and among the foreign archives that preserved Hollywood releases, the Czech Film Archive may be the biggest. "The recoveries from the Czech archive are almost too many to mention," as Pierce wrote, which include over 100 slapstick comedies, at least 20 Tom Mix Westerns, several of John Ford's surviving early Westerns, a nitrate print with the original Technicolor sequences for "Ben-Hur" (1925), Colleen Moore's "Her Wild Oat" (1927), and films from other celebrated filmmakers like Tod Browning, Henry King, Maurice Tourneur and William Wellman. The 1922 "Monte Cristo" starring John Gilbert that I posted a review for a couple months ago also only survived as a foreign-release print preserved in Prague.