A biblical film, in a print from the Komiya Collection of the NFC, Tokyo, with a tableaux structure befitting this genre. It is intensified by the colouring process, with the neutral photographic image under the stencil-colouring changing from scene to scene, alternate scenes using black and white and or sepia toning. Even though this genre is so foreign to our world, we experience a physical empathy with the biblical hero of the film, for example in the brutal scene of his blinding or in the scene where Samson, a blind, humiliated workhorse, has to power the massive, screen-filling stage machinery of the mill.

“The [missing] last tableau shows us Samson entering Paradise.” (Henri Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé des années 1907-1908- 1909, 1994, p.91)