Direct Action, the documentary Ben Russell co-directed with Guillaume Cailleau, runs three and a half hours, consists of roughly thirty-five shots, every one of them locked to a tripod, and it won the Encounters Best Film prize at the Berlinale before screening at the New York Film Festival. It’s a portrait of the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the roughly 150-person collective of farmers, anarchists, and ecologists in western France who occupied thousands of acres to block an airport, won when the project was canceled in 2018, and stayed to build an autonomous community. Russell, an American artist who came up through noise-music scenes and experimental cinema, moved from Los Angeles to Marseille in 2019, and the move is the key to everything.
Why an American Artist Lives in France
Russell is direct about it: the kind of work he makes, non-character-driven experimental nonfiction, has almost no support in the privately financed American system. He frames the whole American-versus-European divide through money. In the US, where film is mostly investor-funded and investors want their money back, subjects drift toward broad appeal, which he thinks breeds the safe rehashing of storytelling structures, and even documentary gets pulled toward the character-driven or the marketable issue. In France, Germany, and the UK, robust public funding takes the box-office burden off, so a film doesn’t have to succeed commercially for everyone to get paid. The catch is that public money generally requires a producer, so you’re obliged to collaborate. Direct Action was made by three people, Russell, Cailleau, who also produced, and a sound recordist, and Russell notes his biggest crew ever was six. He prefers it that way, tracing the autonomy to his roots in an art practice where the artist does most of the work alone.
A Radical Form for a Radical Subject
The method is the argument. Russell comes from a conceptual-art background where, as he puts it, the thing you’re filming is the way you’re filming it, so for a genuinely radical political subject he and Cailleau went looking for a genuinely radical form.
It wasn’t so much about explaining what a thing is, but rather showing how it exists and what it feels like to be there.
They made two decisions that define the film. First, nobody would be interviewed. The ZAD activists are so media-trained and articulate, so practiced at presenting a political self, that letting them talk would have raised a wall of language between the camera and the life; many also simply didn’t want to be filmed, which is why the movie is full of hands at work. Second, they embraced a structuralist rule, set a constraint and hold it until it breaks, and the constraint was the tripod. They shot on Super 16, where a roll runs about ten minutes, went to the ZAD seven times across fourteen months, and averaged a single shot a day, accumulating only about twelve hours of footage for a three-and-a-half-hour film. There’s a justly celebrated shot of a parked car that holds, then slowly pans a full half-circle to discover a doorway behind the camera, that Marcus compares to Tarkovsky. In the edit, Russell discovered something strange: when he and Cailleau trimmed a shot below the length it had run in the moment of filming, it stopped making sense, and you’d find yourself wondering why it was still so long. The shots, it turned out, already knew their own duration.
Here’s the stance the film quietly makes. By refusing both interviews and busy editing, Russell and Cailleau strip away the two things that let a viewer hold a movement at arm’s length: rhetoric and cutting. What’s left is duration, the actual time it takes to build a fence, bake bread, herd an animal, hold a line. And duration becomes the thesis, that militant action isn’t the spectacular clash but the thousands of unglamorous hours before it. By making us spend those hours, the film converts the abstract slogan painted on the ZAD, that other worlds are possible, into something experiential: I watched how long it takes, so I know it can be done. The one-shot-a-day economy is its own form of solidarity, the filmmakers submitting to the same patient, repetitive labor they’re filming.
The Lineage of the Long Take
Russell’s touchstone for the film is Frederick Wiseman, whose decades of institutional portraiture, his films about the welfare state and other public bodies, taught Russell how to make a portrait of a place that’s also an ideology, an environment, and a web of relations between humans and non-humans. The Maysles brothers and direct cinema sit behind that. And for the question of duration itself, Russell points to a lineage of filmmakers unafraid of length, Peter Watkins’s La Commune, James Benning, Lav Diaz, and above all Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.
Tarr’s seven-hour 1994 masterpiece, a hypnotic black-and-white portrait of a muddy, collapsing rural collective and the false prophet who promises its members a new commune, is the canonical work of what’s now called slow cinema, and its long, patient takes are the spiritual ancestor of Direct Action‘s. The film also belongs beside two works Russell didn’t name: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass, a wordless observational record of rural labor and the animals tangled up in it, and Wang Bing’s epic-duration portraits of laboring communities, both of which trust watching and listening over explanation.
What Cinema Can and Can’t Do
For all the talk of activist filmmaking, Russell is careful not to overclaim.
I don’t expect films to produce action, whereas I expect actions to produce actions.
Activism has an urgency cinema can’t match, he argues, because films take years to make and their resonance is ephemeral; a film produces thoughts, feelings, and proximities, while militant action produces concrete events. And yet the thing that genuinely surprised him is that young audiences come out of Direct Action thinking, we could do that, precisely because the film lays bare the labor: build a community, take your time, do it with others, and by the time the brutal state violence of the Sainte-Soline protest arrives near the end, you’ve watched the alliances that made it possible. The abstract becomes achievable.
That conviction extends to how he wants the work seen. Direct Action has an immersive 5.1 mix and an intermission, and a film about a collective, Russell insists, is best experienced by a collective of bodies in a dark room; he doesn’t even watch movies at home. The runtime worried distributors, since at three and a half hours it eats two screening slots, yet it’s the film of his that’s having the biggest theatrical life, with a French cinema release and others abroad. He keeps all his work free online as a reference pointing toward that real, communal encounter, and he’s long run his own screening series and toured film programs like a band, because, as he says, if you want people excited about what you make, you have to produce the context for it too. It’s the same lesson the ZAD teaches and the cinema, at its best, enacts: that the antidote to atomized spectacle is the slow, shared, present-tense experience of being somewhere, together, with other people.
