Direct Action has no characters. Someone may appear in one scene, and then, several sequences later, enter the frame again. Maybe. Direct Action never names anyone; it only shows you their hands—picking through a mud-heavy bucket, playing piano, or making a huge mass of dough, the camera locked on the pile of flour and pool of water and sunned forearms and gyrating fingers combining everything over the course of nine luxurious, unbroken minutes.

Do we ever see those forearms again? Maybe! Direct Action never corroborates, and directors Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell offer no real recognizable faces, no personalities with discernible conflicts and arcs, no names to give an audience some semblance of through line.

In fact, within its deliberate three and a half hours—213 minutes of rigorous and occasionally transcendent filmmaking, with intermission, its pace sometimes so egregiously slow it approaches motionlessness—the film rarely establishes concrete points of context. In its opening title cards, we get “Filmed at the ZAD (Zone-to-Defend) at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France”, then just “2022-2023”, and then everyone involved is listed at the end of the film.

That lack of film subjects is in part the exigency of Direct Action’s leftist and socialist politics, as many activists require functional anonymity to exist. Although an opening scene implies the ZAD was founded on ecological activism around opposing the building of a new airport and, subsequently, some success in getting that airport canceled by the French government, all before filming ever started, Russell and Cailleau—artists and experimental filmmakers who seem to share an affinity for indirect ethnography—avoid explanation. 

But rather than lose the audience—or, worse, induce a nap—a dearth of talking heads and chyrons and foundational background push the film past historical document into something so much more immersive. Plus, the film’s no help in untangling the Marxist, anarchist, and otherwise contentious sub-groups tussling for purity inside the ZAD.

Direct Action attempts to chronicle the everyday experience of a ZAD occupation through documenting the labor of its inhabitants—building it, self-sustaining it, calling it home—rather than the narrative that labor produces. Labor means chores, like tilling the soil and splitting tree stumps and knocking down drywall, as much as it does protesting and putting one’s body on the line under more immediate risk. 

To that end, Direct Action moves between airier vignettes of life on the ZAD and more explicitly violent outcomes of the government cracking down, as the ZAD occupiers (Zadists) give interviews to the press and hold solemn meetings and engage in mass demonstrations against recognizably militarized French police.

Regardless of what’s filmed, Direct Action progresses in long, unbroken takes that were shot—except for one sequence from the bird’s eye of a drone—all on 16mm. With the camera for the most part fixed, infrequently succumbing to a rudimentary pan or unexpected zoom, the directors draw attention to their own labor by exposing the limits of the reality they’re attempting to capture. 

Because a typical reel of 16mm film can really only accommodate a scene that tops out around 11 minutes at 24 frames per second, none of Direct Action’s 16mm scenes is longer than 11 minutes. Even the drone, able to provide the audience with an overall glimpse of the ZAD from the air, is beset by concerns about battery life.

In that sense, Direct Action shares its defiant, minimalist spirit with both the notoriously overwhelmingly sensual documentaries of the Harvard Ethnography Lab (such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Caniba or Leviathan) and the slow cinema of everyone from Hou Hsiao-hsien and Lav Diaz to Kelly Reichardt and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

And like in these examples of similarly glacial cinema, audiences have a lot of time across Direct Action’s extended takes—bearing witness to a water tower, changeless, as clouds change nearly imperceptibly behind it from clear to menacing to a wispy melange, or to a man cooking scores of crêpes, perhaps the same person who made the dough earlier—to both observe and look inward. To observe ourselves observing.  

At one point in Direct Action, we watch a giant industrial saw, used to trim and recover wood, operated by a few placid fellas. The camera sits at the far end of the huge machine, but still can’t take in all the metal. This flattens the audience’s perspective, confusing the distances at any time between human bodies and flesh-rending blades. 

And while we contemplate that peril, we simultaneously sit in this idea of machine-modified labor visualized loudly before us. Is that labor alienation? What about all the splinters that could jump into their goggle-less eyes? 

And while we admire how proud of ourselves we are for not wanting to look at our phones, we can wallow in the visceral pleasures of the scene: the wrangling of the chaos of broken and burnt wood planks into usable materials, the extremely meaty sound of the huge saw cutting through the wood too easily. Watch Direct Action long enough and you may be able to smell that freshly unveiled woodgrain. 

In the same way all these chores physically bind the citizens of the ZAD to that place, doing away with the alienating mechanisms of capitalism and reaffirming some good ole Marxist ideals—in the same way that mowing a lawn just strengthens your relationship with that lawn, regardless of who owns it—Russell and Cailleau compel the audience to meditate on the very realistic possibility of doing the same work and being connected to that work just as deeply. 

Which is so much harder to experience at home, phone and pause button within reach, than with an audience in a theater. Luckily, on April 3, the Clinton Street Theater and Cinema Project bring Direct Action to Portland, to be followed by a Q&A with director Ben Russell, an artist and experimental filmmaker. This will be the undoubtedly best way to see the film, locked into what’s large on screen, without distraction, and accompanied by a creator discussing how it was created. 

Admittedly, some context probably helps. While Direct Action submerges the viewer in frontline protests, much of the film’s power is in its exquisite slowness. Even in a scene in which an overamped crowd for a celebratory punk show bears traces of unpredictable menace, as if anything could happen at any moment, Direct Action isn’t incendiary. It’s no rousing call to the streets. It would likely be a sleep elixir for any hungry activist showing up at the Clinton looking for an atmosphere to get nice and fervent.

Instead, Direct Action is a call to simpler change via milder means, and the Clinton Street Theater the ideal space to be genuinely moved by the film’s remarkably intimate rhythms. 

Direct Action screens at Clinton Street Theater 2522 SE Clinton, Thurs April 3, 7 pm, $10 (no one turned away for lack of funds), tickets here, w/ co-director Ben Russell in attendance.