La Vie est à nous

Described in its original credits simply as 'a film made collectively by a group of technicians, artists and workers' with no names appearing, La Vie est à nous was the most overt work of the French Popular Front, made by Renoir with the assistance of Jacques Becker and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others, and produced by the Communist Party. Basically a collection of documentary footage and vignettes satirising bourgeois society, offering up plenty of Communist-inspired optimism; but what marks it out from most propagandist tracts is the familiar Renoir theme of community ideals transcending social classes, expressed so eloquently in his previous feature, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. A film of its time, conceived in the shadow of Hitler, it still communicates its message with an irrepressible joy and swagger.