Direct Action. Courtesy of NYFF
In 2022, experimental documentarian Ben Russell approached the filmmaker and visual artist Guillaume Cailleau about making a documentary, set in ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, about an anarchist collective that won their struggle against the construction of a regional airport by the French state in 2018. Their resulting collaboration, Direct Action, observes the day-to-day of the 150-some residents of the ZAD (zone à défendre). They continue to organize their day-to-day lives against the machinations of capital, living as proof that different worlds are possible amidst hegemonic capitalism and the climate crisis.
Cailleau and Russell experience their subjects through delicate, considered Super 16mm photography—seeking to translate the lived time on the ZAD into the cinema. In durational shots, audiences observe lumber being milled, bread dough being prepared, people dancing at a DIY rock n’ roll show. In the following interview, Russell emphasizes that “every shot in the film,” no matter how ostensibly banal they might seem, “has an ideological underpinning.”
Direct Action culminates in the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March of 2023, where over 10,000 people gathered to protest water privatization and were met by 3,000 police who fired over 5,000 canisters of tear gas at the protestors. In this stunning sequence, a woman passes by the camera, telling the filmmakers that these are not the images they should be capturing. She forefronts a question underpinning the form of the film and its practical development, namely how left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical movements should be represented. Cailleau and Russell’s answer is to have their form determine the content. This manifests in the principle of direct action—both in the political sense of extending control of circumstances against capital, and in the literal of directly portraying action—which drives all of their images.
Direct Action premiered at Berlinale and will play next at the 62nd New York Film Festival. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: For security reasons, you can’t be so intimate in filming every single person or filming faces, so you choose to highlight bodies. Their labor becomes one of the protagonists of the film. Is it important for you to emphasize this in creating the portrait of the movement?
BEN RUSSELL: We wanted to make a portrait of everybody. It is counter to the notion of developing individual characters and following their struggles, which I think is also something that capitalism proposes as a main way of existing. But we’re dealing with a collective body that happens to be made of individuals who are politically formed and aligned far on the left. If you have a film that’s about a group of anarchists, activists, militants. How do you portray them as a totality? The move away from individual faces and towards bodies and proximities and people in spaces was really an attempt to get to that.
GUILLAUME CAILLEAU: By deciding to focus on body parts, we create what Ben says, this global body. But it also helps us to think not only about individuals, but also about animals, about spaces, about plants that are in space, and all those not. We’re not following one human all around, trying to get this totality.
BR: Right. The subject is the ZAD, and whatever messy amalgam of environments, structures, animals, and human animals that are inhabiting it. So it was really about trying to get all of it in some way, and understanding that all of it is beyond the capacity of cinema, so just trying to get three-and-a-half hours out of it.
D: Some of it you weren’t allowed to capture, like the direct democracy meetings. Did that change the film you wanted to make?
BR: One of the best things that we can do as filmmakers is just to be present and be attentive in relation to what’s happening. And if you have ideas of what a film is before you make it, then maybe it’s better if you’re operating in the realm of fiction rather than nonfiction. Guillaume and I, before we went to the ZAD, hadn’t spent any time on the ZAD, and so we would be hard-pressed to have an idea of what the film we would make after spending 14 months there would be. Also, the process of shooting on film is to some extent an openness to possibility, serendipity, alignment. We’re not filming all of the time. We’re selecting moments, or moments are selecting us.
You know, we tried to film meetings every time we went there. But for a variety of reasons—security being one of them—people just weren’t willing to do it. And I think historically, within the representation of activist movements, you see very few of these direct action, direct democracy meetings because of the stakes but also because there’s something quite intimate about them that wasn’t maybe what this film was asking to do.
D: Instead of asking about political machinations, your film becomes about the everyday rhythms, showing people making bread, people working the lumber mill. I think it creates almost a utopian portrait because this labor doesn’t feel exploitive in the context of the film. It’s people working for each other.
GC: My question would be, why do you think it’s so utopian? Because it’s what people do.
BR: To Guillaume’s point, at least in my practice, an inquiry into what utopia is has been a pretty defining characteristic. I’ve chosen cinema as the place to produce that inquiry because cinema is a temporary space that only exists as long as you’re with it, which is what utopia, as I understand it, is. Whereas the lived space, the actual space that it’s happening in, is something that continues. We were interested in going to the ZAD, because it was a place, as I said, where they had succeeded in whatever capacity. They had a set of goals, and they achieved those goals. In terms of leftist movements, it’s very rare that that sort of thing happens. Maybe they’re utopian in that they’re not beholden to a kind of capitalist economy.
I think Guillaume’s question is good, the fact that we think about not being beholden to conditions of exploited labor and we think about that as utopian is a bit of a fucked up place to approach it. I’m certainly guilty of that as well, maybe Guillaume in his proletariat background is a bit more free of that.
GC: One of the first things that struck us there is how much work people are doing. So they’re working a lot. But still it seems like maybe it feels good to do this work when you know why you do it.
BR: Or it’s good to do it when you’re in service to a cause that is not an economic system. I think that’s also part of what’s exciting and compelling about it. I would say every shot in the film has an ideological underpinning. They’re not just cutting logs, there’s a rationale and a pretty clear political theorization behind all of the choices that one is making, which is true for all of us in our everyday, but it’s not something that most of us are engaged in pulling apart or acknowledging.
D: Labor without alienation makes it feel utopian.
BR: What I would say is what the tagline of this ZAD is—that other worlds are possible. Is that right, Guillaume?
GC: Exactement.
BR: And that those other worlds exist. What’s been surprising about the reception of the film is that it produces a pretty clear map of how this thing can happen, right? It’s evidence that collectivity, solidarity, shared engagement really results in the kind of thing that we imagine to be utopian but is, in fact, lived.
GC: We don’t see much conflict in the film, and so that’s maybe what makes it feel utopian in a way, or idyllic. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, of course there is conflict or tensions everywhere, but that’s not where we were looking at doing the film. I also like the idea that this film can be inspiring for some people to join or to create something similar.
BR: It also wasn’t our experience of the place when we arrived there, in part because a lot of—to go back to the question about being able to film faces or hands, or questions of security—films are always objects of the condition of production. The fact that we were outsiders entering into a space, and spending a bit of time coming back, but the fact that we were doing it in a place that had already been well documented or reported on, meant that people were quite aware of our capacities as image makers and were quite effective in their intimity. They weren’t willing on the whole to expose the lines of tension or turmoil, that surely exist. And for our part, as collaborators, we weren’t willing to push.
I don’t believe in filming people who don’t want to be filmed. We always also gave our subjects the option of cutting anything from the film, which happened. There was some stuff in the almost final edit that folks thought was dangerous or or too close, and they asked to be removed. And we removed it, because we tried to be as transparent as we could be.
D: It makes the subjects part of the authorship of the movie, more than is usually credited in documentary. And I think it’s interesting that the two of you decided to make this film together collectively. Is that an important part in representing a collective movement?
BR: It wasn’t the idea that we went there with. It became the idea that made sense. Working within a non-hierarchical system of collaboration, saying that I was the director and Guillaume was the producer was sort of beside the point. When we made the decision to become co-authors it felt quite evident. I feel like the way that labor is usually organized is also around kinds of power, kinds of authority, and so to call oneself a director is to say that you’re one kind of one kind of worker, to be a producer is a different kind of worker, and one has more value over the other.
The thing that is also pretty thrilling is understanding that the film has a functional role as well, which is kind of what Guillaume alluded to—recruiting people to the militant cause. The virtue of making a portrait of a group that has been successful is that it represents a successful model for people to emulate. We’re both definitely leftists and aligned with the people in our film, and so at least emotionally recruiting people feels pretty significant. This thing has something that’s very concrete about it that has been really positive to witness.
D: The choice of shooting the film on Super 16mm is very interesting. And the one time that you switch the digital images, it’s also limited by the battery of the drone that it’s being filmed on. Every time you decide to turn on the camera, you have an extremely limited window with which to capture. What was the decision to go with that?
BR: I shoot on film, and I have for the last two decades. I try to find subjects whose ways of being are somehow aligned with the form that I’m choosing to use. I rationalize “what sense does it make to film a certain group with a certain kind of camera or certain kind of medium?” and then I try to understand what the relationship can be, which is really thinking about a kind of direct correlation between form and content—that the way you shoot determines what you shoot, determines who the subject is, and how they happen. You could film on an infinite number of rolls of film, but you still have to change it every 10 minutes, and you have to clap and do these other things. In thinking about how to represent a subject whose primary attribute seems to be its temporality, it makes a lot of sense to really think carefully about how time manifests between the recording device and the subject being recorded.
GC: There is also something about being very present in the moment, in not anticipating too much what you’re going to do later with it. The focus that it needs is also representative, in a way, of the way people in the militant world are in their day-to-day—with a bigger idea, but still with the continuous present being so important to them. The apparatus that we had was also quite interesting, because it really made us very visible, very slow. It put us in a different position as opposed to coming with an iPhone or digital camera and very quickly grabbing stuff.
BR: All of that proposes a certain kind of visibility, and as Guillaume says, our presence in relation to our subjects, and in trying to maintain transparency, it was necessary that we remain visible, that we weren’t trying to sneak shots or get things quickly. The kind of stuff that we wanted was the stuff that we were in some kind of accord with.
Alex Lei is a writer and filmmaker based in Baltimore. His writing on film has appeared in Documentary, Filmmaker, and Paste magazine, amongst others.