The Fire of the Match Factory

June 16, 1913.

On June 16, 1913, a fire broke out at a match factory in Częstochowa. Firefighters rushed to the scene to battle the blaze—and so did a cameraman, who captured the extraordinary event on film. It remains one of the oldest surviving Polish newsreels. The film was made by the brothers Władysław and Antoni Krzemiński, pioneers of Polish cinema who ran the Odeon cinema in Częstochowa. The footage screened there just two days after the widely reported fire. Until now, only defective, poor-quality copies existed, with the left side of the image cropped off. The film has now been restored from a 1913 nitrate print and a 1969 counter-negative.