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Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath, 2024)

In Henry Fonda for President, director Alexander Horwath charts the evolution of 20th-century American politics through the life and career of the iconic Hollywood actor. Taking its name from the storyline of a two-part episode of the 1970s TV series Maude—in which Bea Arthur’s title character mounts a grassroots presidential campaign for a guest-starring Fonda—Horwath’s 185-minute video essay pairs excerpts from the actor’s vast filmography with analytical voiceover and unreleased audio from a Playboy interview with Fonda, conducted just a year before his death in 1982.

Given that premise, it’s unsurprising that Horwath cites Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) as a primary influence. Like that seminal work, which took a similarly theoretical view of cinema’s ability to bear witness to history while simultaneously rewriting it in its own image, Horwath’s film casts a wide net over a very specific subject. Fonda’s leftist politics were no secret, and through excerpts of his collaborations with directors such as John Ford, Preston Sturges, Fritz Lang, Sidney Lumet, and Sergio Leone, Horwath reveals how the cinematic manifestations of these principles—whether in the populist fury of the Depression-set The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the anti-McCarthy undercurrents of 12 Angry Men (1957), or the Vietnam-era disillusionment of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—reflected greater shifts in America’s cultural consciousness.

Henry Fonda for President is Horwath’s first film, but it acts as a kind of summation of the critical and curatorial work of the Austrian cinephile over the last four decades, as the director of both the Viennale (1992-1997) and the Austrian Film Museum (2002-2017), and as a critic, author, and editor of book-length studies on Josef von Sternberg and the American cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. As with those books, the key to Henry Fonda for President is its outsider’s perspective. Horwath weaves in a retelling of his teenage encounter with Fonda’s films in Paris in 1980, as well as a quasi-travelogue thread in which the director and his two primary collaborators, editor-cinematographer-soundman Michael Palm and artistic advisor Regina Schlagnitweit, tour many of the sites featured in Fonda’s films (including the O.K. Corral from 1946’s My Darling Clementine and the Weedpatch Migrant Camp from The Grapes of Wrath). Horwath isn’t out to critique U.S. policy so much as survey the impression those policies left on the cinema of the era and the man who, for many, came to be seen as a symbol of the nation’s conscience. Fonda pushed back on that idea, frequently claiming that he never saw much of himself in the characters he portrayed. John Steinbeck once observed of the actor (in a quote also featured in the film) that “his face is a picture of opposites in conflict.” More than any text or historical account I’ve come across, Horwath’s film gets close to squaring those contradictions, without simplifying or dispelling the ambiguity so crucial to the Fonda persona.

Last summer, I met up with Horwath in Vienna to talk about his long road to filmmaking and how his collaborative approach to the essay format influenced the scope and sensibility of this years-in-the-making debut.

Was there a movie or a moment that you can remember when you realized that an actor could symbolize something greater than themselves? Or was it when you discovered Henry Fonda?

Fonda was definitely a part of the realization. Even as a teenager, I was already reading actors’ biographies and learning about what they stood for. I wanted to know how they related to the world apart from the screen. It became obvious that Fonda was an interesting person politically—I realized that really early on; in 11th grade I wrote a paper about him for school. As a precocious leftist, I was also interested in John Wayne; everybody told me that he was the worst, that he directed The Green Berets (1968), that he was a racist and a Nixon supporter. I had to come to terms with the fact that I still liked Wayne. When I finally saw The Searchers (1956), it was clear to me that things were more complex in American cinema than the groups I was in would care to admit. It was the beginning of the Reagan era, and I was interested in finding a way to come to terms with the richness of a film like The Searchers. Some of that may still be present in Henry Fonda for President—my conflicted feelings about America are what drove me to go there while making the film, and to spend time with the people we met on the road. We asked these people what they thought about western stars, what they thought about liberty or freedom. My friends back home wouldn’t ever want to talk to someone who would vote for Trump. They would simply avoid a conversation. But I’m not avoiding the conversation. I may not be happy with that conversation, but I was always interested in having that conversation.

When did you discover the audio of Fonda’s last interview? Was this something that was in circulation?

No, it was not. I knew that Fonda did two things in his last year. One was an autobiography, which is an as-told-to book by Howard Teichmann called Fonda: My Life. It’s a 400-page book, but it’s mostly Fonda speaking. Also, to promote the autobiography, Fonda was interviewed for Playboy by Lawrence Grobel. I realized later that the published interview was just a fragment of the 12 or 13 hours of conversation that they recorded. Grobel came every day, Monday to Saturday, for a week and recorded for two hours [each time]. I spent half a year transcribing everything. I just wanted to have the whole thing—to hear the first reactions. It was just a way to get to know this person from a different angle. Of course, reading the autobiography and reading various things about him, you do get a good sense, but to have that voice with you for half of a year was quite something.

Getting access to this audio also made me realize I could have two narrators, so to speak. There would be Fonda’s voice, all through the film, and there would be my voice in German. It was very important to me not to do an English-language version of my narration, so it’s clear that this comes from somebody who’s not an American.

I’m curious about the various chronologies in the film. You don’t go through the movies in the order of their release dates, but more often by the years in which they’re set, while also tracing the Fonda family history from well before any of the films were made. 

Since I wanted it to be a film as much about U.S. history as about Fonda, we decided pretty early on that the film needed one spine and that, very trivially, it should be the years. There’s the prologue, of course, with me—Paris, 1980. But then we go to the mid-17th century with the first Fonda on American soil, and we return at the end to the 1980s, to the end of Fonda’s life. The history that the films tell is mostly, but not always, linear. With, for instance, Fort Apache (1948), the point that I wanted to make was about the images of masculinity that Fonda could straddle in the ’40s, so I had no problem including The Lady Eve (1941) in a passage that dealt with the Indian Wars and nominally deals with Fort Apache in the 1870s, since it’s about the way Fonda deals with his body and conflicted manhood. There was no purism involved in telling a chronological film history.

Can you talk about the impulse to visit the films’ locations?

It became clear at a certain point that I wanted to talk about America just as much as about Fonda. That was also the moment when we left behind the idea of doing just an archival film. Everything was happening in parallel. I was rereading Lincoln’s speeches. I was going into different pockets of U.S. history. I got to know [19th-century writer] Margaret Fuller, and I was fascinated more and more by her, and by how, at such an early moment, she wrote about Native Americans and women’s rights. Then I realized that moment is around the time when Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) takes place—during Lincoln’s years in New Salem, Illinois.

The main idea was that, by going to these locations, we would encounter places and people who would maybe lead us to certain things about American history that you wouldn’t get from reading, say, Howard Zinn or Richard Slotkin. You can read all the professional historians, but when you’re in Fort Apache or in Tombstone, you also get to meet all those crypto-historians, people who know crazy details. When you walk through New Salem and you talk to the people, it’s a history village. They dress up as people from the 1830s.

You’ve had an interesting trajectory from criticism to curation to filmmaking. Did you think about the film as you would have thought about a piece of writing? Or was it a completely different process for you?

I am a writer—or at least I started as a writer—and I feel safe in writing, even though it takes me horrible amounts of time. I began this project by trying to put into words what I wanted to do, and certain ideas, certain insights or observations. An essay is a category of writing, but the essay is also, for a long time now, a very great and, for me, very important category of filmmaking. It was clear that this film could only be a so-called “essay film.” I’m lucky because I know a lot of essayistic films. I worked with [French filmmaker and academic] Jean-Pierre Gorin on a great retrospective of essay films [for the 2007 Viennale] called “The Way of the Termite,” so I had a lot of examples, even though I purposefully did not look at Chris Marker films. I felt much too shy or small. Maybe Los Angeles Plays Itself and Jean-Pierre’s films are the ones that are closest to mine.

I gave myself over to completely rewriting, changing, and cutting my text, because I realized that, due to the way elements are constellated in cinema, the sentences I needed to use were totally different from the ones I had on paper. The text changed in tandem with the editing process—10, 12, 15 times. That’s why a film essay can be even richer, I believe, than a literary essay. I love literary essays, but I love cinematic essays even more.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series. He’s a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and a program consultant for the Quinzaine des cinéastes.