Germinal

France | 1993 | 160 minutes

Credits In Brief Director Claude Berri Adapted from the novel by Emile Zola, Germinal depicts a miner’s strike and Screenplay Claude Berri, Arlette Langmann repression by the authorities in mid-19th century France. Gerard Depardieu and Miou Miou star. Music (novel by Émile Zola ) Photography

Cast Maheude Miou-Miou Étienne Lantier Renaud Chaval Jean-Roger Milo Toussaint Maheu Gérard Depardieu

'Germinal' a Vision of Hope for Workers Claude Berri's soaring, magnificent film of Emile Zola's "Germinal" (at the Royal) cuts right to the movies' unique, paradoxical power of rendering human misery at its most unrelenting with images of surpassing grandeur and meaning. Pictures don't get much bleaker than this 158-minute epic saga of the grinding existence of 19th-Century French coal miners--but they don't get much more beautiful either. Berri and his formidable yet understated cinematographer, Yves Angelo, aided by Jean-Louis Roque's subtle yet stirring score, bring a unifying, majestic lyricism to their contrasting views of the few ultra-rich and the many desperately poor. "Germinal," France's official entry in the Oscars, glows with the humanism and passion for authenticity that were Zola's hallmarks, and is a worthy successor to Berri's similarly powerful "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Springs." The story is set roughly a century ago, but it's actually unfolding, with varying degrees of severity, around the world right now. As a leader in the international Naturalist literary movement, Zola believed that the destinies of most people, especially the poor, were dictated--and usually harshly--by environment. In any event, the Maheu family and their friends and neighbors, who labor mightily at the Voreux pit in Northern France, could scarcely be more trapped. Times are bad, which means that the miners must concentrate on loading their carts as fully and as often as possible at the expense of properly securing the mine's tunnels with timber; if they complain, they risk losing all payment for timbering. Maheu (Gerard Depardieu) and his wife, Maheude (Miou-Miou), have seven children, more than they can support, but doubtlessly religion--and quite possibly ignorance as well--have made birth control out of the question. Besides, as the community's resident anarchist (Laurent Terzieff, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lenin) remarks, "Capitalism allows workers only to eat dry bread and make babies." But now pay cuts threaten to take away the bread and to starve the babies. A quiet, reasonable man, Maheu, a foreman, emerges as the leader of a strike movement after management has refused his modest plea for enough pay to provide daily bread. What keeps cuts between the Maheu's barren table and that of the mine's managing director (Jacques Dacqmine) with its elaborate, abundant fare from seeming heavy-handed is that Zola--and Berri--are able to perceive that the haves are actually vulnerable to the same economic system as the have-nots. Zola may have had a passion for social reform, but thankfully it is tempered by a healthy pessimism that keeps it from seeming like self-righteous ax-grinding. "Germinal," which has too profound a vision of life to be a mere message movie, is no Marxist tract--just a simple urging for the privileged to share

Mines, Miners and Mining more generously with the needy, i.e., you shouldn't be eating brioche when your workers can't afford bread. In an actual abandoned mining community, restored for the film down to the last detail, Berri has gathered a large and superb ensemble cast that includes Jean Carmet as the Maheu grandfather stricken with black lung, Judith Henry as their grown daughter and Jean-Roger Milo as her hot-tempered, homely suitor. Triggered by the arrival of the idealistic, dangerously naive, labor-organizing machinist Etienne Lantier (Renaud), the plight of the Maheus and everyone else at Voreux goes from bad to the unspeakably worse, culminating in multiple tragedies characteristic of ancient Greek drama. Since "Germinal" is so determinedly grim and the socioeconomic ills and injustices it depicts so depressingly familiar, one might well ask why one should submit to it--and submission, make no mistake about it, is precisely what is required. The answer is that we can see ourselves in the film's people and be moved by their plight, buoyed by their warm, earthy spirit and thrilled by how vividly Berri has brought the past back to life. "Germinal" offers only the most tentative note of hope, but that it was made in the first place is in itself an act of affirmation. Kevin Thomas, LA Times

Germinal - Emile Zola warning contains full synopsis Germinal(1885) is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film adaptations and two television productions. The title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring month. Germen is a Latin word which means "seed"; the novel describes the hope for a better future that seeds amongst the miners. Germinal was written between April 1884 and January 1885. It was first serialized between November 1884 and February 1885 in the periodical Gil Blas, then in March 1885 published as a book. The novel's central character is Étienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), and originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the trains" thriller La Bête humaine (1890) before the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Germinal persuaded him otherwise. The young migrant worker arrives at the forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior, Étienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit. Étienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as Étienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Zola keeps his theorizing in the background and Étienne's motivations are much more natural as a result. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class movement literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political émigré who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits. Étienne's simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very reminiscent of the rebel Silvère in the first novel in the cycle, (1871). While this is going on, Étienne also falls for Maheu's daughter Catherine, also

Mines, Miners and Mining employed pushing carts in the mines, and he is drawn into the relationship between her and her brutish lover Chaval, a prototype for the character of Buteau in Zola's later novel (1887). The complex tangle of the miners' lives is played out against a backdrop of severe poverty and oppression, as their working and living conditions continue to worsen throughout the novel; eventually, pushed to breaking point, the miners decide to strike and Étienne, now a respected member of the community and recognized as a political idealist, becomes the leader of the movement. While the anarchist Souvarine preaches violent action, the miners and their families hold back, their poverty becoming ever more disastrous, until they are sparked into a ferocious riot, the violence of which is described in explicit terms by Zola, as well as providing some of the novelist's best and most evocative crowd scenes. The rioters are eventually confronted by police and the army that repress the revolt in a violent and unforgettable episode. Disillusioned, the miners go back to work, blaming Étienne for the failure of the strike; then, Souvarine sabotages the entrance shaft of one of the Montsou pits, trapping Étienne, Catherine and Chaval at the bottom. The ensuing drama and the long wait for rescue are among some of Zola's best scenes, and the novel draws to a dramatic close. Étienne is eventually rescued and fired but he goes on to live in Paris with Pluchart. Historical context Michele Angiolillo uttered clearly the word Germinal before he died. The title, Germinal, is drawn from the springtime seventh month of the French Revolutionary Calendar and is meant to evoke imagery of germination, new growth and fertility. Accordingly, Zola ends the novel on a note of hope and one that has provided inspiration to socialist and reformist causes of all kinds throughout the years since its first publication: "Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself." By the time of his death, the novel had come to be recognized as his undisputed masterpiece. At his funeral crowds of workers gathered, cheering the cortège with shouts of "Germinal! Germinal!". Since then the book has come to symbolize working class causes and to this day retains a special place in French mining-town folklore. Zola was always very proud of Germinal and was always keen to defend its accuracy against accusations of hyperbole and exaggeration (from the conservatives) or of slander against the working classes (from the socialists). His research had been typically thorough, especially the parts involving lengthy observational visits to northern French mining towns in 1884, such as witnessing the after-effects of a crippling miners' strike first-hand at Anzin or actually going down a working coal pit at . The mine scenes are especially vivid and haunting as a result. A sensation upon original publication, it is now by far the best-selling of Zola's novels, both in France and internationally. A number of exceptional modern translations are currently in print and widely available. Wikipedia

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