Bruce Loeb on Piano Having adapted Victor Hugo's Les Miserables the year before, pioneer director Albert Capellani turned to Emile Zola in 1913. Germinal adheres to Zola's story telling of the bitter sufferings of workers in the French mines, his pleas for social reform that find expression in the characters themselves, and finally, his fatalistic vision of the class conflict. Cross-cutting, dissolves, impressive longshots and pans are all put to an aesthetics of verisimilitude. Richard Abel writes in The Cine Goes to Town: "The first part, in fact, which lasts several reels, functions almost like a documentary on the everyday life of workers in the coal mining industry (much of it) shot on location. (Germinal) anticipates what Delluc and others would argue that French films should be doing after the war-for its story emerges gradually (albeit melodramatically), as one of several possible events or incidents, out of a specific, thoroughly described natural or social milieu."