La Vie Est à Nous
The first militant left-wing film made in France, and the only official film of the Popular Front, this rare re-discovery bears the mark of its “supervisor” Jean Renoir throughout, but was directed by Renoir, Jacques Becker, Jacques Brunius, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, and others. Among a large cast are the directors themselves, as well as Gaston Modot, whom we might recognize from L'Age d'Or and who was involved in the left-wing group of cineastes, “Ciné-Liberte.”
Described by Pierre Bost as “at once a documentary, a montage, and an anthology, of persuasive sketches,” La Vie Est à Nous gives a “portrait” of the 200 families said to rule France, of French Fascist demonstrations of the period, and of activities and reactions of various working people. But this information is transmitted by the finest directors and photographers of the period in what eminent film critic Georges Sadoul calls “unarguably a brilliant work of art, stylistically characteristic of Renoir during his best period....” A highlight is Renoir's mischievous editing in which the Fascist leader, Colonel de la Rocque, performs an idiotic little dance to the barking sounds of Adolph Hitler.
In his book, “Jean Renoir,” Raymond Durgnat comments:
“Clearly Renoir believed in his film's arguments as convincing, as answering an urgent need, and reckoned the very avowal of the need would imply a self-confidence which was itself persuasion. The arguments are not sugared but imbued with a warmth and hopefulness which, Renoir knew, would take didacticism in its stride....
“...That political rhetoric and rallies can be deeply moving should surprise no one, and the film is beautiful precisely because its structure brings into vivid relationship (1) the concealed structures of society, (2) the organisation needed to combat them, (3) mutual aid (rather than a vicious circle of alienations, e.g., from unemployment to shame to solitude to cynicism to apathy or Fascism), and (4) individuality (the masses are not faceless; it is the faces which compose the crowd). Its specific politics apart, Las Vie Est à Nous has a moral beauty...though its sentiment is on the broad side, its lyricism is a response to a situation which is more complex, more daunting, than the simplicity of war.... La Vie Est à Nous...helps one clarify a film genre too often subsumed under the label ‘documentary,' and currently proving very much richer than it: the ‘essay,' or rather, non-fiction, film, built on an intellectual argument (e.g., October, La Vie Commence Demain, Description d'Un Combat, Loin De Vietnam, One Plus One)....”
Evidently further to the Left than the Popular Front government itself, the film was first banned, then thought lost until its small-scale re-release in 1969.