We went to see the film “Direct action” in preview at the Le Concorde cinema, in Nantes, with directors Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell. And like the rest of the room, we loved it.
Writing a review on “Direct Action” is a difficult exercise, as this film is a UFO in the cinematographic landscape. We could use many adjectives to describe it, but we would still have difficulty accounting for the 3h30 of fixed shots, these 36 paintings in the form of sequence shots filmed over more than a year at the ZAD of Notre-Dame -des-Landes.
Yes, said like that, it seems horribly boring, 3h30 of documentary film without voice-over, without plot, without commentary which preludes for the viewer what to remember from it. A contemplative film, attentive to detail: 16mm in the countryside, with a camera that manages to make itself forgotten. And yet, we are not bored for a single second, there is nothing to take away from these 3.5 hours, and certainly not the intermission: 10 minutes of rain on car wrecks, old abandoned barricade of the ZAD, which leaves time for spectators to go have a coffee, pee, smoke a cigarette or simply talk to their cinema friends to share their first impressions.
Our first impressions are that “Direct action” takes the time to explore a place of life without falling into the trap that was set for it: activist tourism. Directors who arrive at a place of struggle supposedly to speak out for those concerned and who take the opportunity to romanticize their fight in order to tell a story have already been seen. Conversely, here it is life on the ZAD that counts before the film. Ben Russell says that “the first week, we first immersed ourselves in the ZAD, we wanted to meet the people. We only shot one shot, and in the end we didn't even put it in the film.”
Rather than telling a story of zadists, the directors let the ZAD take over their images. There is nothing urgent to show: the battles in the area are over, the ZAD has defeated the airport project, and it is it which can now tell its own story. But there are no words to describe the film we were able to witness: contemplative, but also alive, precise, rebellious, sensitive, alive, whole, alive… That's it, alive: as alive as the ZAD since its creation, vibrant and unexpected, passionate and combative.
The series of sequence shots is thought of as so many paintings of everything that makes up life in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The film thus offers a myriad of different realities, but which find their coherence in the ZAD, as if to say that direct action is simply living. “Live and work in the country” as the peasant movements of the region said in the 1960s. The ZAD achieves this utopia through work, and numerous close shots show characters working with wood, iron, maintaining a chainsaw or preparing products. pancakes before going to sell them at the local market. A chosen work, often repetitive but which has extricated itself from alienation, a work which takes care of the people and the world around them.
More broadly, the film explores the daily life of the ZAD (child's birthday, militant reading, music, etc.) and the relationship with the omnipresent animals: newly born calves returning to the meadow, pigs, sheep, trees, draft horses… but especially birds. The background noise of the ZAD is this bird song that never stops when the State is not there to attack this area protected from capitalist predation. Special mention to the scene, as absurd as it is poetic, of a human describing interrogation techniques and the reasons for remaining silent in custody to… a sow rolling lasciviously in the mud. A sort of cross-species anti-repression manual.
The main character of “Direct Action” is therefore the ZAD in its entirety. And this place is also a militant base, a place where ecological resistance to capitalism and “modernity” is built. The Zadists had warned since their installation: this movement was a revolt against the airport “and its world”. It is therefore from Notre-Dame-des-Landes that the Earth Uprisings emerge, bringing together peasant anger and territorial struggles throughout France. We thus follow a preparatory meeting in Sainte-Soline, where the fight against megabasins and the grabbing of water by agro-industry is organized, where a press conference in the face of the dissolution of the Earth Uprisings .
The images of Sainte-Soline are a turning point in the film, and the title “Direct action” takes on its full meaning. Living in the ZAD is already a direct action in itself, but it implies defending it, or at least defending its principle. A 16 mm camera installed on its tripod, in front of a ditch in the middle of plowed and poisoned fields, captures the smiles and the jovial mood of the demonstrators approaching the basin. A terrible capture for those who watch it: the whole room knows what happens next, the surge of violence from the State, the injured, the trauma.
If you have experienced Sainte-Soline in your flesh, you may want to go out and take a break, take a deep breath while the following scene unfolds, which awakens all the anger and the feeling of injustice in us. to the power of the blind, impassive, destructive State. A long and tense scene, punctuated by explosions. Images nevertheless necessary: the repression of Sainte-Soline is only one episode in the life of the ZAD, but it is an integral part of it. We must never forget that the ZAD is a fight that is never won.
Since the entire rest of the film is shot on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the scenes in Sainte-Soline are surprising with their intensity, their violence and their territorial disconnection. Asked on this subject, why Sainte-Soline and not just the ZAD, director Guillaume Cailleau answers: “Because the ZAD is not a geographical territory, it is a state of mind which goes beyond Notre-Dame-des- Landes. In Sainte-Soline, it was the ZAD outside the ZAD”. As the slogan says so well: the ZAD is everywhere!
