Thoughtful film curation asks us to consider films in a new light. Alexander Horwath knows this better than most, having served as director of the Vienna International Film Festival and the Austrian Film Museum during the last thirty-plus years. His Henry Fonda for President, making its US Premiere at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, is an example, wrapped in film essay clothing, of extremely thoughtful and surprising curation. It’s a cinematic compendium about the work, life, and contradictory identity of the actor Henry Fonda; more than that, it could be summed up as a distillation of both Horwath’s cinephilic passions and his professional devotion to historical exploration.
A quote from Hannah Arendt in the film’s opening few minutes suggests that because a lived life informs the work of an actor, the work will reveal something about the lived life of the person doing the acting. Everything from enduring classics (The Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln, My Darling Clementine, 12 Angry Men, and Once Upon a Time in the West, among others) to lesser-known titles (The Farmer Takes a Wife, Let Us Live, The Male Animal, Strange Victory, and Spencer’s Mountain), then, act as unconscious illustrations of Fonda’s identity. The staunch Hollywood Liberal, furious at the anti-communist witch hunts that poisoned the industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s; the embodiment of the common man facing the onslaught of the Great Depression, peering out into the distance for answers he may never find; the voice of reason amidst an anxious country’s cannibalistic infighting; the unexpected bridge between the Hollywood old guard and the new, embodied by his own children. All of these versions of Fonda, and more, Horwath suggests, are found as readily in the films and characters he plays as they are in the man’s own personal history.
Horwath’s ready cinephilia makes Henry Fonda a fruitful and pleasurable watch. One marvels at the ease with which he articulates a particular Fonda performance’s qualities as much as delights in the clever and seemingly obvious connections he makes between a film and historical event. Because you can sense Horwath’s passion, his knowledge never feels overwhelming or like a suggestion of his superior intellect. Even if the film does take some time to find its rhythm, the rush of stimulation, be it Horwath’s concise narration, a sequence from his ample original footage, a clip from Fonda’s filmography, a segment of an interview, or some combination, is constant and invigorating.
If there is one idea to take as Henry Fonda’s primary argument, it is its suggestion that a lot of America’s telling of its own history takes the form of elaborate, shallow pageantry. In Horwath’s eyes it is no coincidence that the endless recycling of puffed-up myths about the conquering of the American West — shown in all its chintzy glory in contemporary Tombstone, Arizona, where the ghost of Wyatt Earp lives on more through time-warped memories of Fonda’s filmic embodiment of the outlaw-turned-lawman, than in his actual history — are as much at home in the contemporary American imagination as Ronald Reagan’s reputation as one of the country’s last great leaders. The burnt-out vestiges of truth hold far more sway when they’re reconstituted as myth; John Ford recognized this when he killed Henry Fonda’s obstinate Colonel Thursday in Fort Apache only to have John Wayne’s Captain York valorize his misguided leadership to the press in the film’s close. Horwath inverts this mythologization in Henry Fonda’s framing scenes, a 1976 episode of the sitcom, Maude, in which Beatrice Arthur’s title character formally organizes the Henry Fonda for President campaign, only for the real Henry Fonda to show up, accompanied by the studio audiences’ reverent applause, and dash her hopes. If Ronald Reagan is the worst kind of mythologized political figure because his desire was too transparent and all-the-more craven for his feigned humility, then Henry Fonda, the self-doubting, quick to anger, unbeholden Common Man, is the best kind. Our only loss is that means we’ll never get it.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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