Die geheimnisvolle Streichholzdose (1910) User Reviews

Unmatched

[boblipton · 6/10 · 4 July 2011]

A legless seller of matches falls asleep and dreams of matches performing tricks in stop-motion animation in this trick film from 1910.

Apparently produced to take advantage of the market for such films, a demand made evident by the succeed of Emile Cohl's series of animation in France, this one pretty much follows the pattern as box after a box of wooden match forms into various configurations, ending with a windmill that burns down. I don't recall if Cohl ever did one involving match sticks, it would have looked pretty much like this.

The director of this piece, Guido Seeber, was a cinematographer with a taste for technical oddities. He ended up working with Paul Leni.

A Match Box Mystery review

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 14 May 2020]

German trick photography short in which matches move around to form various shapes. Diverting enough, but nothing that hadn't been done before, even in 1910.

Early German Stop-Motion Animation

[Cineanalyst · 29 November 2020]

"A Match Box Mystery" is a charming if rather unremarkable trick film and early, although hardly the first, example of stop-motion animation. I saw it as part of the Edition Filmmuseum's "Screening the Poor" series, for which I suppose it was included because the film begins with live-action footage of a legless man selling matches in the street. Most of the picture, however, is consumed by the matchsticks dancing about and making figures via stop-motion animation, including beating "Frankenstein" (1931) to the punch by burning a windmill.

Guido Seeber, who made the film, is an important figure in the history of German cinema. A sort of Billy Bitzer of Deutschland with an emphasis on special visual effects, he was behind the multiple-exposure work of the first "Student of Prague" (1913) film and went on to pioneer the "unchained camera" in "Sylvester" (1923). He was arguably the first great cinematographer in a country that became renowned for genius handling of the camera--the likes of Sepp Allgeier, Karl Freund, Carl Hoffmann, Günther Krampf, Eugen Schüfftan, Theodor Sparkuhl, and Fritz Arno Wagner.

(From Deutsches Filminstitut 35mm print)

Not a match made in heaven, but not too bad either

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 25 November 2016]

"Die geheimnisvolle Streichholzdose" is a German short film from 1910, so this one is already over 100 years old and it was made by Guido Seeber as one of his rare directorial efforts. Seeber can certainly be considered one of the finest cinematographers German film has ever seen and he worked on several films that are considered silent film classics today. This really short film we have here is of course also a silent film, but this should really surprise nobody looking at when this was made. And same can be said about the fact that it is a black-and-white film. It is basically all about the animation in here that includes many matches and the things Seeber turns them into. I would say that this is neither a good nor a bad film from 1910. There's better and worse out there. As a whole, by today's standards, this is really only worth seeing today for silent film enthusiasts. Everybody else can skip it and they won't be missing much.