An interview with Ben Russell
Benjamin Crais sits down with director Ben Russell to discuss Direct Action.
Much of the final stretch of Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau’s 2024 documentary DIRECT ACTION takes place in the thick of what has come to be known as the “Battle of Sainte-Soline.” In March 2023, thousands of people flooded the area to block the construction of a mega-basin. The demonstrators were met with extreme aggression by a militarized police force which wounded hundreds and left two in a coma. In the days that followed, the French government vowed to crack down on “eco-terrorism” and moved to dissolve the group that had co-organized the action: Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Uprisings of the Earth).
If DIRECT ACTION concludes on this confrontation with the state, the bulk of its 216-minute runtime is devoted to what the French government is so violently attempting to suppress: the communal (re)appropriation of the earth. Soulèvements de la Terre emerged out of the ZAD (Zone to Defend) movement, a series of land occupations intended to obstruct large-scale development projects. For DIRECT ACTION, the filmmakers inhabited the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes after it successfully compelled the state to abandon its plans to construct a new airport in the area. Russell and Cailleau’s film is less interested in explaining the political dynamics that continue to shape the ZAD than conveying the quotidian space-time of the commune—what Kristin Ross describes as “the collective elaboration of a desired way of life” in which “the means [become] the end.” Patiently capturing the rhythms of collective life and labor, DIRECT ACTION makes the world we’re fighting for sensible in the smallest detail: the sound of birdsong where there might have been the roar of engines.
Benjamin Crais: One of the questions raised by DIRECT ACTION concerns the role of the filmmaker in relation to left-wing political movements such as Soulèvements de la Terre. I’m thinking of the moment during the Battle of Saint-Soline when a woman yells at you “This isn’t what you should be filming!” but also the film’s opening scene: your 16mm camera trained on digital images shot by participants in the ZAD. In your interview with Film Comment, you remarked “We’re not activists, we’re making films” and I wonder if you could elaborate on this claim—both in terms of how you came to make a film of ZAD/SLT and how you understand your role as a filmmaker in this activist context?
Ben Russell: It’s a good question. I would say that the histories of political and militant cinema in the United States and France are so widely divergent that it felt hard to imagine calling myself a militant filmmaker as an American. I mean, it’s important to show this film here in the United States but the audiences are not very big - whereas in France or in Spain or in Portugal, where there is an idea of political cinema that can also be a cinema cinema, the film has had a much different reception. I think this is both because of the perceived use value and possibility of cinema.
I searched out the ZAD as a subject because, in my understanding, the struggle against the airport had ended and the ZADists been victorious— and victory felt like a much more interesting topic than anything else. What does it look like or feel like when you win? And what happens next? The fight against the airport was such a large framing device for everything that had happened that when you pulled that way, what did you have left? The ZAD experienced a very profound and seismic break when the airport project was cancelled because the government forced the ZADists to legalize, to sign contracts, enter lease agreements, and to declare agricultural projects. Half of the ZADists left the ZAD feeling like the victory was in fact a defeat. There’s still a lot of animosity and anger between those who left and those who stayed, but we didn’t talk to any of the former – we chose to make our film with those who continued to live in the ZAD in 2022.
We didn’t come to the ZAD as militant filmmakers – while we wanted to make work that could be in service to the cause, this wasn’t all we were after. Recently, somebody was talking to me about Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, which takes places in a fictionalized ZAD (of sorts) – they were disappointed in the pessimism of the book and said “your film feels like good propaganda.” I’m very happy to have made good propaganda for something that I feel is absolutely worthwhile and necessary. For myself and Guillaume, that was never the question - but the timeline of activism is so different than the timeline of cinema or art that the two can’t be easily worked out together; there’s so much urgency and immediacy in the activist circle and so much exhaustion because of this. Cinema has a much longer echo – that’s what happens with this film, where we’re seeing images more than a year after they were recorded, where we’re talking about arrests quite some time after they happened. It felt disingenuous to talk about what we were doing as militant or in the tradition of militantism; it seemed more useful to find different tools to talk about the possibilities of image making within a context and a framework that takes on the trappings of a subject, but isn’t necessarily the subject itself.
BC: When the woman accuses you of filming the “wrong thing,” I wondered what the “right” image would be.
BR: Yeah, I don’t know either. There were 15,000 protestors and there were so many journalists and media folks that we were just one amongst many others. I assumed she meant that we shouldn’t only be filming the Black Bloc throwing Molotovs at the cops—which is also how I felt when I was filming it. In that moment, I was quite uncertain that I’d be able to use that image of the protest - because of the way that kind of image is used by the state against social movements to discredit them. This is of course what happened immediately: the French state released similar images and talked only about the number of police officers that had been injured. I think there were around twenty cops who suffered from inhaling too much tear gas - but there were three-hundred protestors who were injured, three of whom were put in a coma. They didn’t talk about that. And so we felt that sure, this certainly isn’t the only thing we should be filming, but because we arrived at it after ten months of filming a lot of other stuff at the ZAD—horses, sheep, pigs, and blacksmiths—in the end, we felt that it was an important sequence to include.
BC: In the collection of texts about Soulèvements de la Terre put out by Ill Will, Kristin Ross writes that one of the core tenets of the movement is that the abstract call to “save the climate” must be brought down to earth—to the organized defense of territory, the communal habitation of specific areas of land. And one of the most notable aspects of DIRECT ACTION is precisely this movement towards the concrete: an attentiveness to the physicality and duration of the various practices that sustain the ZAD. These practices—and the social and natural milieu they sustain—also take precedence over the representation of any particular individuals or leaders in the movement. I wonder if you could speak to how the political content of ZAD/SLT shaped the form of your film.
BR: Guillaume and I—and our publisher, Iris éditions—are publishing a book comprised of interviews that are meant to exist in parallel to DIRECT ACTION. In this process, we spoke with a few people who said that during the anti-airport protests journalists always wanted to talk about individuals: they wanted to find and name leaders for what was clearly a collective movement . You see this in the press conference at the end of the film, where the journalists ask about Benoît Feuillu - one of the spokespeople for Les Soulèvements de la Terre - it’s another attempt to make an individual in charge of a movement.
Between 2012 and 2018, most people on the ZAD referred to themselves as Camille - men and women - and requested that their faces not be filmed during interviews. An aspect of this persists on the ZAD today – this is still a community of people who are under heavy surveillance by the state. That’s why there aren’t cellphones in the film: because they function as tracking devices, as listening devices, and it has been clearly documented that the state is using this technology against activists. Most of the people in the ZAD are also what’s called fiche S —they are flagged as being a threat to national security and if they are stopped by the cops or leave France they’re subject to searches, harassment, etc. The state has since called them terrorists and so this is clearly a real concern.
But I’m thinking of when you mentioned Eisenstein [before the interview] and I think a lot about that: that moment in Soviet cinema where the idea was to make a film that could talk about a movement without talking about individuals. If you’re trying to foreground a collective ideology, then celebrating individuals or creating characters that you follow through narrative space does that ideology a disservice and is a poor reflection of what the collective can be. In the broader scheme of things, it’s important to resist the tendency to highlight individual stories because that’s what capitalism wants us to do: it wants us to think of ourselves as singularities around which everything else circles. And so, as best we could, we tried to push the idea of collective portraiture within the film: to make a portrait of everyone and everything—humans and non-humans and sky and time— in order to really think about the territory of the ZAD. The film is a reflection of that territory, a reflection that includes time, movement, season, etc.
BC: At least until the Battle of Sainte-Soline, these concerns seem to suggest a different connotation of “direct action” than usually evoked by the term, one that bears on the practices that sustain the commune form.
BR: I’m not an authority on the film—I only co-authored it—and while I don’t want to foreclose other readings of it, I always understood the title of DIRECT ACTIONS as referring to the totality of events: direct action is all of it, nothing is possible without everything else. I studied visual anthropology for a little while and within that discipline there was always a discussion about representing the whole act. When I started making films in Suriname, I felt like it was difficult to know when and where the act begins. When do you start? If you’re talking about the subjects of colonialism who are the descendants of runaway slaves, do you begin with when the colony was founded or when the Maroons escaped or do you jump to who they are now and how they live now? I always felt that it was best to enter into the middle of the whole act and trust in the time of the film to produce the context that the viewer needs—which isn’t a context based on the knowledge – and therefore over the subject – but rather on an understanding that happens through shared time and proximity.
These ideas are definitely present within this film. Direct action is protest, but it is a kind of protest only made possible by the acts of collective engagement and solidarity that exist before and after it, via all of the activities that exist within a community that strives towards autonomy. It drives the decisions about the kinds of farming equipment that they use, about working with animals that have been given to them, about making bread that is not sold but made available at a prix libre, about providing any surplus in production to other movements in solidarity. All of this is part of the same idea, an idea that I also thought about along the lines of Frederick Wiseman: as the portrait of an institution. If we assume that the idea of direct action is an institution, then what is its representation as an object that exists in space?
BC: That question of “where to begin?” you mentioned also seems very close to the political principles of the movement: that the revolution isn’t just some future event, but something you must begin creating in the present.
BR: Right, it’s like the chess game in the film. You can’t win all the time, but you can’t lose it all the time either, so you just have to keep playing. And that was also the idea: we knew before we ever got to the ZAD that there couldn’t just be a single victory, but rather a series of victories and defeats that constitute a process over time. I think that’s what Kristin Ross is saying when she writes that the impossibility of fighting “climate change” is countered by the very real possibility of battling the privatization of water. Activism at the local level accumulates and produce resistance towards something much larger. But if you start from the other side—which has been the strategy of petroleum companies: to make individuals feel responsible for global warming—then you can’t do anything at all because you feel “crushed by eco-anxiety.” Local movements can clearly provide a template for resistance and change – and this has been one of the main lessons of the ZAD. They kept an international airport from being built in western France – taken on a global scale, this is not an incredibly significant act. But in the same way that the Zapatistas were able to demarcate a territory and hold onto it, the ZAD has been a clear beacon of hope and possibility for other movements worldwide.
BC: The first part of the film concludes with an extended aerial survey of the territory of the ZAD shot by a camera mounted on a drone. The sequence is formally distinct from the rest of the film—not only because shot digitally, but because the film is so terrestrial otherwise. Yet, it’s also very consonant within a longer history of filming agrarian struggles and communes—the opening shot of Thomas Harlan’s Torre Bela (1975) for instance or the final sequence of Ogawa Pro’s Summer in Sanrizuka (1968). The latter is, of course, also concerned with the struggle against the construction of an airport and evokes, in that final sequence, its absence—that there is no place to land. I wonder if you could speak to the importance of bringing the whole territory into view at this moment in the film.
BR: The nice thing about making long movies is that you get to really think about the development of time over time —how the movement has to change not just within or between the shots, but how it transforms across the duration of the film. After spending the first hour and a half of DIRECT ACTION on the ground, in occasionally claustrophobic and close quarters, it was important for us to give people a deep breath that could also serve to visually contextualize the space that we’d been circling around. Prior to that, we’d spent a lot of time on the sound design to produce the sounds of other spaces in proximity, to create slow crossfade audio transitions that allow for one shot to slip into the next almost unnoticed. The drone shot, however, was a way to really show the territory and to do it via a ZADist whose self-appointed job during the occupation involved making drones that could potentially take out police drones and provide counter-surveillance. In our 14-month process of making this film, we essentially tried to talk to everybody. We had a lot of conversations with the drone operator but it wasn’t until he shared his YouTube channel with us, a channel where he was mostly stoned and flying drones above the clouds, that this sequence seemed like an important one to have in the film. And just like the Ogawa film, it felt vital to have an aerial shot in a film that’s effectively about the absence of aerial shots—or the absence of an airport.
BC: Right, it frames the sounds and sights of the ZAD as the antithesis of capitalist development: you can only see and hear what you do because the airport isn’t there.
BR: Exactly. For us, being there meant being in a place that would have otherwise been something else entirely. I mean, the territory itself is quite mundane: it’s just farmland. But you would spend time planting garlic in the fields or screenprinting posters or you’d go into the woods late at night and there would be yellow-and-black salamanders all over the ground and you’d think: in a parallel world, none of this would be here at all, everything would be covered over in tarmac. The ZAD’s lighthouse was built where the airport control tower was supposed to be – to server as a physical reminder of a different kind of future. In this way, the film also serves as an index of all that would have been destroyed if the airport had been built.
BC: How much of a reference point was Ogawa’s cycle for you and Guillaume in conceiving DIRECT ACTION? In many ways, it feels close to Ogawa’s films—not only the struggle against the airport, but also the principle of embedding yourself in the commune. Yet there are also divergences: you maintain a kind of observational distance, a slight oblique angle, that Ogawa does not.
BR: Guillaume and I had seen a few of Ogawa’s films, but hadn’t actually seen the airport one until we’d been filming for a while. What’s interesting for us about Ogawa is how those projects unfolded and how they led to so many other films. Now that we’ve finished one film and made a book together, we still want to go and hang out with people on the ZAD. We’ve started talking about making our next collaboration, but why should we go somewhere else to make a project when this community of ZADists still exists and is still so active in what’s happening? It’s easy to understand how spending time with a community can slowly make you into a part of that community.
This is the disappointing part of being a filmmaker: it’s connected to what I said earlier about the apparent binary of making films or being an activist. Activism is arguably more important than filmmaking and this makes it difficult to hold onto the necessity of cinema—even if cinema clearly has an emotional, ephemeral, and long-term effect on the bodies and psyches of everyone I love. There’s a quote in the book, “if your house is burning, do you film it or do you put out the fire?”— this is a question one of the activists posed towards us and their answer is, “you put out the fire.”
BC: Maybe it’s a false alternative in this case. One of the basic principles of communism is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” If that one guy builds drones, maybe you film.
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