Screening | Czech Films on the Rooftop: mystification, which has been lasting since 1967 and still is alive!

Come and enjoy Czech films and Manhattan views on the rooftop. Films are screened at dusk. In case of bad weather films will be screened at 8:30 pm indoors. All films in Czech with English subtitles. Tonight: Jára Cimrman Lying, Sleeping.

"The biography of Jára da Cimrman, a fictive Czech genius, 3 August 2000.
Author: dtomek from Prague, Czechia

This movie is a result of a mystification, which has been lasting since 1967 and still is alive. It is almost impossible to explain to a foreigner, but I shall try. A group of artists invented the personality of Jára da Cimrman in the late 60ies. Cimrman is a fictive personality, a universal genius, who was active in all branches of science and art in the times before the First World War. Unfortunately, his attempts were not successful. There is a specialized theater developing this idea in quasi-scientific seminars and theatre plays. You may wonder, how such an idea can survive more than 30 years. So do I.

Zdenìk Svìrák and Ladislav Smojlak, the two directors and main actors behind Cimrman, have become very popular through the years. They both have other artistic projects outside the Cimrman theatre; Zdenìk Svìrák wrote the screen-play and starred in `Kolja', the Oscar (1997) movie directed by his son, Jan Svìrák. Although he always denies such ideas, Zdenìk Svìrák would is widely accepted as a candidate for the Czech president to follow Václav Havel.

`Cimrman lezící a spící (Cimrman laying and sleeping)' consists mainly from independent sketches, where Cimrman meets various personalities of his times and advises them: he tells A. P. Cechov to call his novel `Three sisters' instead of `Two sisters', he advises Gustav Eiffel in conceiving the Eiffel Tower etc. In this respect, `Forest Gump' was in the Czech Republic mentioned as the American form of Cimrman.