Abstract
This study draws on compilation films and popularization programs commemorating either the personality of Jan Kříženecký, his films, or the beginnings of Czech cinema, and, using the concepts of memory studies, asks firstly how Kříženecký's films and his personality circulated in secondary texts, and secondly the ways and meanings of appropriation of Kříženecký's original film work and his legacy. Considering the specifics of Kříženecký's life story in the broader context of remembering the inventors of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it grasps why Kříženecký remains a ridiculous oddball in the popular imagination.