Introduction to budding stories

Introduction to budding stories | Appreciation | Reflection

1993 color film 136 minutes

Produced by France Lance Film Studio.

Director: Claude Berri (based on Zola's novel of the same name) Photography: Patrick Baudrillard's main actors: Vivi (as maher's wife), Jean Reno (as Landier), Jean Karmai (as Suvalin), Yu Dieter Henry (as Catalina), Jean-Lori Miro (as maher's father), Gerald De.

abstract

1863, because of his radical ideas, Landie was dismissed by Lille Railway Company and went to the mining area in Calais Province to find a job.

He met an old man who kept coughing for the first time. The miner who has worked in the coal mine for 40 years is nicknamed "immortal" because he lived three times. His lungs are full of dust and his phlegm is black. He is maher's father. After his guidance, Langdiye came to the pit. The cable car keeps sending thousands of miners to the bottom of the well through cages.

Before dawn, maher's daughter Katrina woke her family to go to work. Maher's wife, who gave birth to seven children, complained that her family had no money to buy bread.

Black miners dig coal with picks at the working face, and then load the coal into the mine car with both hands, and the coal is pulled out of the inclined shaft by people or horses. Engineers found the roadway support unsafe and threatened Maher with a fine. Maher was speechless with anger.

After work, the maher family scrambled to take turns taking a bath in a vat full of hot water. After taking a bath, the eldest son hurried out to date the miner's lamp. Maher was about to make out with his wife as soon as he got out of the bathtub.

Landier took over from a dead woman worker and settled down in a small shop. He sat in an open-air cafe and watched Katrina being pulled into the Woods by a man, and his heart was very unhappy. The market is very active. Maher is watching the cockfighting. He invited Landie to eat the local roasted sausage and joined the dance in the square.

Landie met Suvalin, a non-Marxist, in a small shop. Lang Jie believes that in order to improve the living conditions of workers, we must unite and set up mutual aid associations to argue with the management. Suvalin believes that only by breaking the world with violence can there be a way out. The two men were flushed in the debate. Although they have different views, they are fellow travelers after all.

The workers gathered in the square were indignant at the management's wage cuts. At Landie's instigation, the workers began to strike. After a sumptuous lunch, Grecourt Wa, the general manager of the coal mine, stood by the crackling fireplace in his luxurious house and proudly met the representatives of the striking workers. The negotiations between the two sides were fruitless. The workers went fishing by the river, but only a few people were still at work, including Katrina and her husband. The strikers called them traitors and stopped them from fighting in the pithead. Women went to the bakery to grab food and ruined the store. The bakery owner was rushed to the top of the building because he often hooked up with women, and fell to his death in a panic.

The strike lasted more than a month and the management recalled the workers from Belgium. The strikers tried to stop the foreigners who broke the strike, but the army and the police followed closely. Maher led the workers to confront the military police. When the workers started throwing stones, the gendarmerie fired. Maher and dozens of workers died on the spot. Maher's wife held the body and wept bitterly.

The strike failed and the workers had to go to work. Langdiye also went down the well with anger. Suvalin destroyed the drainage equipment in the middle of the night and groundwater poured into the well. Underground workers found water gushing and quickly fled to the cage, but the elevator only rescued some workers and the cable of the cage was broken. Underground workers had to rush to the emergency exit, but the safety roadway collapsed and many workers were trapped underground. Landier helped Katrina find a way out, but she ran into a wall everywhere and had to lie in a waterless place waiting for help. Katrina's husband bears a grudge against Randhir because he loves his wife, and he is also trapped at the bottom of the well. He was jealous when he saw Randy lying with his wife. He wanted * * * exhausted Katrina to be stoned to death by Landier. Katrina fell happily in Randy's arms.

Rescuers finally heard the sound of Landie knocking on the shed post, but when he was rescued, the beautiful Katrina had stopped breathing.

After the mine was flooded, there was another gas explosion. Maher's two sons are dead, and maher's wife is in great pain. Out of sympathy, the mine manager's wife took her daughter to visit the Macher family. Maher's father can't die because of the disaster, and his nerves are almost abnormal. He strangled Cecil, the daughter of the general manager, with both hands.

Every family suffered from the strike, so people hated Landie, the organizer of the strike. Someone spat in his face, and someone grabbed him by the collar and hit him. He knows that it is not a day's work to enlighten workers. He decided to mobilize the masses in other places first.

Before he left, he came to the pit to say goodbye to the workers. Maher's wife had to go to work by herself, because there was no male labor force at home. After destroying the mine, Suvalin fled the mine. maher's father was not sentenced because of insanity, and he has been living at home.

Langdiye, who embarked on a new journey, knew that although the blow failed temporarily, the seeds of revenge had been planted. In the land soaked with workers' blood, there will soon be a new struggle. Once it breaks through the ground, it will have unlimited vitality.

Distinguish and appreciate

Emile Zola is one of the most important French writers of critical realism in the second half of the19th century, and also the main advocate of French naturalism literature. His Italian father died at the age of seven, leaving orphans and widows living in poverty, which had a great influence on Zola's later description of the life at the bottom of society. Germination, published in 1885, is the representative work of Zola's realism. It successfully created the image of industrial proletarians for the first time in the history of French and even world literature. It not only describes the poverty and suffering of miners, but also points out that this inhuman living condition is the evil result of capitalist system. Germination is a gloomy epic of the workers' movement, and it is also a passionate hymn.

To commemorate the centenary of the publication of Germination, the famous French director Claude Berri once again put it on the screen. As early as 19 13, the French director Abel Cappellani made Germination into a 140-minute black-and-white silent film. Although this film, like a drama, has only eight scenes, its social impact is still great. It should be pointed out that the film ends with a handshake between employers and employees, which not only betrays the original spirit, but also reduces its social significance. 1962, French director Yves raiguel once again made a black-and-white film with 1 10 minutes, which was clear in narrative and elegant in picture, but lacked social impact. Although the main chapters in the novel are faithfully reproduced, the main contradiction of capitalist society vividly described by Zola, namely the life-and-death struggle between employers and employees, is still not prominent in the film. The author's deliberate description of "the rise of wage and wage labor" and "the struggle between capital and labor" failed to become the main line of the film.

Claude Berri's new film "Germination" is very different from the previous two films of the same name. What is presented to the audience is a tragic epic of the working class, and we hear the voice of the working class demanding justice. We have seen miners who have been brutally exploited 100 years, from their ancestors to their parents, crying for bread. Anger erupts like a volcano, destroying everything and sweeping everything. The power of madness is getting bigger and bigger, rolling forward. In the scene of fighting with the armed police, we saw thousands of miners rushing forward, the people in front fell down and the people behind rushed up. Anger and hatred accumulated from generation to generation broke out among the first awakened workers. Like the waves, they swept in and locked all the mines. Facing the bayonets of the military and police, the strikers were fearless. After the strike, the economic resources were cut off, and the mutual aid association advocated by Langjie played a role. The organization and firmness of industrial workers are fully reflected in this film. As a whole, the proletariat stood in the foreground of history, and this theme first appeared in literary works. Berry's films clearly emphasize the social significance of the original.

The film is very close to the original in structure. Just like a magnificent symphony, it can be divided into seven parts. The first four parts are introduction, opening, development and deepening. The context clearly tells the emergence, expansion and upsurge of miners' resistance. The introduction is that Langdiye, full of revolutionary thoughts, came to the mining area alone, and his propaganda and agitation work ran through the whole film. The director reveals the opposition between employers and employees through comparison: the workers have no bread to eat, but the bourgeoisie eats delicacies, the manager's daughter Cecil is still exhausted in the middle of the night, and Katrina has to go to work when she gets up in the middle of the night. Hidden deep contradictions and crises will break out sooner or later. The fifth part is the movie's * * *-strike, and the last two parts describe the failure and ending of the strike. The film begins with the protagonist Landie walking from the field trail to the mining area in the dark before dawn, and ends with his wish to leave the mining area. Before dawn, he embarked on a new journey, and the whole film echoed.

The "green shoots" symbolizing hope and the future appear and disappear in the film, which runs through it. Landie preached the truth of revolutionary struggle among miners. After sowing seeds in this fertile black land, this symbol appeared with the arrival of spring. The hero looked at the vibrant wheat waves, and the voice-over said: "When people are lamenting the suffering and suffering underground, a vitality is sprouting and marching on the ground." When chatting in the middle of the night, with Langdiye's deep eyes looking at the starry night sky outside the window, the audience heard his heart again: "Now the miners are completely awake, and they are like a fine seed buried in the ground and began to sprout." After the strike began, the cable car stopped rolling, and people silently fished by the river, but the audience felt even more in silence than in the sound. Even maher's father, who was not very conscious, realized that "in the depths of the mine, an army is growing, and this generation of new people will soon break out of the ground and thrive in the warm sunshine". At the end of the film, with towards the distant, the protagonist's brisk footsteps, the voice-over said: "The ranks are growing day by day, and the black revenge army is growing slowly in the fields. They want a bumper harvest in the next few years. The sprout of this team is about to break through the earth and be active in the world. " Almost all Zola's works end in tragedy, and her mood is quite low. Although the film "Germination" directed by Berry also ended in tragedy, the mood was optimistic and light. This prophetic optimism endows the strike with a high fighting atmosphere, which makes the film have an epic tragic momentum, bold pictures and full of romantic lyricism. It can be seen that the director of this film deeply understands Zola's confidence in the social prospect, which reflects the profound analysis of the social reality in the original work, the generalization and refinement of ordinary daily life, and grasps the essence of things. Therefore, it can be said that the film got rid of Zola's naturalistic description method of crawling in reality and made the work return to the principle of critical realism.

However, in order to be faithful to the original, Claude Berri still followed the naturalistic brushwork of the original when describing the private life of maher and his wife, when describing the tryst between Katrina and her lover, and when exposing the bakery owner's exploitation of women's poverty. This description of real life often does not reflect the ideological characteristics of the characters, nor does it show too much social content. In fact, to some extent, it reflects Zola's wrong view of the object of description. Zola believes that miners are ignorant, rude and uncivilized, which makes them inevitably indulge themselves and like to do obscene actions. This view of Zola makes the image of workers in his works closer to reality, but in fact it has lost many colors. In addition, Zola still has illusions about Bourgeois, which is also reflected in the film. He thinks that bosses pursue profits, but they are not lacking in humanity, and even have kind feelings, so he describes the chaotic actions of smashing shops and destroying them everywhere in the strike with a reproachful attitude: Cecil, the kind daughter of the manager, was strangled by Mach's father who didn't know the truth. The film reveals Zola's reformist thought in many places.

Although the film is in color, the light and tone are almost black. The coal mining area is characterized by black. The outside of the mine is black coal and coal ash, and the inside of the mine is dark. Miners are covered in black "coal spots", and the sputum they spit out and the blood that flowed out when they were killed are black. Only when it snows will the village turn white, but it is "like being wrapped in a shroud". If white is a symbol of silence and nothingness, then black is a symbol of melancholy, fear and oppression. This dark world is the real world where miners live. This symbolic landscape depiction, as gloomy and bleak as printmaking, gives the film a lot of tragic colors. The highlight of the film often focuses on Vivi's wife Maher. She was once a coal miner. In order to maintain a 10 family, she works day and night at home. After having seven children, she has lost interest in * * *. When her husband wanted to have fun after taking a shower, she called her daughter's name for fear of getting pregnant again. Before the strike, she took her children to the manager's house to beg. After the strike started, there was nothing at home. She still encouraged the miners to stick to it. After her husband died, she had to go down to the mine to do 10 hours of hard work instead of her husband, earning 30 Lai Su to support her family. What she experienced made her gradually understand that the day of revenge would come, and this kind woman finally burst into angry cries under the pressure of life. When Randhir was about to embark on a new journey and came to the mine to say goodbye to her, she said to him, "We have been hungry for two months, sold all our belongings, and the children are sick. Is it just free? " Do you still want us to live that unreasonable life? "Vivi has successfully created this ordinary and great image of working women.

Gerard de Padieu, an international movie star, created a respectable and upright miner image in this film. Inspired by Langdiye, he joined the workers' mutual aid association, led the workers to petition during the strike, was fearless in the face of the military and police, and finally shot himself. At the beginning of the film, before the cast list was printed, he solemnly declared: "In view of the increasingly serious unemployment problem in France, I advocate the establishment of a' budding federation' to solve the life difficulties of people in the entertainment industry, and warmly welcome people from all walks of life to participate. This organization will start its activities on 1995. I call on all parts of the country to establish such federations. Because this is not a charity, but an organization of solidarity and mutual assistance. " Didn't this great literary work, which was born more than a century ago, have a far-reaching historical impact and show immortal vitality?