Henry Fonda for President

An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls “The United States of Fonda,” finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. Combining his own commentary with excerpts from Fonda’s final 1981 interview, extensive archival imagery and newly shot footage, Horwath explores the many connections and frictions that exist between the history of the US and the trajectory of Fonda’s life and work. Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema—as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow. (Erika Balsom)

In the presence of Alexander Horwath, Regina Schlagnitweit, Michael Palm (camera) and Ralph Wieser (Producer).