Muž z Prvního Století
Entry updated 3 January 2025. Tagged: Film.
["Man from the First Century"] Czech film (1962; vt The Man from the First Century; vt The Man from the Past; Man in Outer Space). Filmové Studio Barrandov. Directed by Oldřich Lipský. Written by Lipský, Miloŝ Fiola and Jan Fišer (story); Lipský, Fiola, Fišer, and Zdeněk Bláha (screenplay). Cast includes Anita Kajlichova, Otomar Krejča, Milos Kopecký, Radovan Lukavský and Vít Olmer. 95 minutes. Black and white.
In the latter part of the twenty-first century, a pioneering Czech Spaceship is about to launch, with four astronauts in spacesuits prepared to board. However, an inept upholsterer named Josef (Kopecký) is still working inside the ship, and he accidentally presses a lever that sends the spaceship soaring into space with him as its sole passenger. He then encounters a white-skinned Alien (Lukavský) from the Blue Star, whom he names Adam; the alien offers to return him to Earth, accompanying him in order to learn more about humans. (He can make himself Invisible so as to be an unobtrusive observer.) However, Josef discovers when he arrives that he has somehow advanced several centuries into the future (see Time Travel); he is the "man from the first century" because future people have based their calendar not on the birth of Jesus Christ but on the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957. The Earth is now a Utopia, with numerous Technological achievements, but a series of comedic incidents involve Josef's inability to comprehend or adjust to this future society and its elevated values; his reactions serve to satirize questionable present-day attitudes (see Satire), but also comment on the dangers of Automation. Almost all of the action takes place in interior settings filled with machines, but one scene shows two lovers (Kajlichova and Olmer) embracing outdoors on a grassy plain, suggesting that there is still a place in this scientifically advanced world for the simple pleasures of nature. The film concludes when Adam decides it would be best to return Josef to his own era.
Of course, there were other comedy films of this era featuring incompetent amateurs who become inadvertent space travellers, such as Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959), Rehla ilal Kamar (1959) and Conquistador de la Luna (1960), but this film unusually focuses not on the experience of Space Flight or characters's misadventures on other planets, but rather employs space travel solely as a device to bring a contemporary man into an ideal society to show that he cannot cope with it. This is also one of several films in which a voyage into space ends with time travel to Earth – into the past in the series It's About Time (1966-1967), but more commonly into the future, as in World Without End (1956), "The Man Who Was Never Born" (1963), an episode of The Outer Limits, and most famously the original Planet of the Apes (1968). [GW]
links
previous versions of this entry