Mode Retro

   The Mode Rétro is a name given to a trend in films made in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the subject of the Nazi Occupation of France in World War II. The mode was a tendency to deal openly with the issue of the Occupation and with French collaboration with the Occupation. It is interesting in that it lasted only for a few short years, and it ran in direct contrast to the dominant mode of writing, thinking, and filming about the Occupation, called resistancialisme by historian Henry Rousso.

   Resistancialisme is the name given to the French tendency to depict resistance to the Nazis as the standard mode adopted by the French, and this view of the Occupation was inaugurated by none other than Charles de Gaulle on the eve of the Liberation. Films seen as belonging to the Mode Rétro include Marcel Ôphuls's Le Chagrin et la pitié (1968), which some critics have seen as inaugurating the trend and Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1971). François Truffaut's Le Dernier métro (1980) is seen by some critics as the last film of the mode rétro and by others as the first film to shift the trend back toward representations of resistance. A very late example of this sort of film is Jacques Audiard's Un héros très discret (1996), which was made just before the trial of Maurice Papon for war crimes and collaboration. That trial arguably put a final end to resistancialisme. A parallel mode has been seen to exist in literature from the same period.