"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)