As a genre, the Kulturfilm is so broad and comprises such diverse works that it has frequently served as a playground for young directors. Zündhölzer is a perfect case in point: what appears on the surface to be a documentary portrait of a match factory emerges as an aesthetic experiment. The film satirises the typical industrial film production of the time. The voiceover is mechanically spoken, the workers fade into the background, while the machines – the new protagonists of the film – move in perfect synch to the music composed by Oskar Sala, inventor of the Trautonium, one of the first electronic musical instruments. At the top of this complex, multilayered film lie Uwe Krauss’s impressionistic images and animated tableaux. The carefully composed shots evoke a variety of associations, ranging from precise military arrangement to the controlled flow of a film print through a projector.

Lou Burkart