Year Two - HCJ - Emile Zola

I didn't show this in the lecture, but here's some clips from the movie of Germinal. This captures the tremendous violence of the book and gives a glimpse of the soulness characters who are driven entirely by overpowering physical desires. Everything they do occurs through utter necessity and they are buffeted about by forces of nature. The film technique here echos Zola's graphic writing style and I think the way the camera lingers on these frightful faces with their harshness. There is not one drop of sentimentality or morality in the book. All of this will be important when we look at photojournalism and at the generic type of observational feature writing style. I read it again for the lecture (I have not lecturered on this for about ten years and i was struck by how its strength is undiminished even in an age of consent zombie flesh eater type films, fireball movies, etc, etc). To write Germinal Zola famously spent months down a coal mine making accurate notes about how the whole things work. the famous scene when a pit pony is lowered down the mineshaft is rather thrown away in the film; as is the horrific spinechilling account of climbing out of the mine up the razor sharp iron ladder. I would be happy to show the film DVD quality in the HJLT if anyone thought we could get a decent-sized audience. I think Zola is much more effective than Dickens and of all the social realist fiction writers of the 19th century - all of them important for the development of journalism stylistics - I think Zola is way ahead. But others may differ. Comments?