A wonderful film, but even better is the novel itself by Emile Zola. For anyone who has struggled through the ups and downs of an organizing drive, it is one of the saddest and moving novels I have ever read. It's not a happy book but it is a very deep analysis of the role different groups play in both building a mass explosion of activism at the grassroots, and the elements that tear it apart.
--Nathan Newman ----------------------
Yes. It is a very powerful. But for the sake of I am not sure what, if you match Germinal with The Possessed (Dostoyevski), you really get an effect that is stunning.
That effect is something like an insight into the criminalization of what should be a progressive and potentially revolutionary ground, oppressed to such a degree that it finds nothing but destruction. Which is maybe a literary version of what is happening in a lot places--like the school shootings.
Chuck Grimes