GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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The good the bad and the ugly
DENNIS BROE counsels ideological caution when committing to the next batch of ‘series’ visited on us by the predatory networks this autumn
HONOURABLE: Thierry Godard as Toussaint Maheu in Germinal
[SALTO]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
IT’S Emmy Award season but rather than dwell on television’s past it might be better to dwell on its future.
What follows are the best (and worst) of autumn series previewed at the recently concluded Series Mania, the Festival of Global Television in the French north-west former mining centre of Lille, where many of the series were concerned with either highlighting or concealing and smoothing over class differences in the wake of the vast transfer of wealth that has followed the Covid billionaire accumulation in the online goldrush.
The location was relevant because the best of these series was a new French public television version of Germinal. Two episodes of the six were broadcast at sites throughout this region which, when Zola wrote the novel in the 1880s about a coalminers’ action in 1860, was still the coalmining and industrial centre of the world.
The novel is a long debate about the need for, the effectiveness of, and the tactical ways of managing a strike as a way of workers clawing back some measure of decency from a life which requires ever more sacrifices just to make one’s daily bread.
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