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Lack of good storyline.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"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.

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 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.