From its title on down, Henry Fonda for President both follows along and defies the idiosyncratic, sweeping aims it has set for itself. The filmmaking debut of longtime film critic and Austrian Film Museum director Alexander Horwath takes its name from the plot of an episode of the obscure sitcom Maude, and while it’s never meant as a completely sincere political statement, it sums up the aspirational tone of both the actor’s most beloved work and the impossibility of concrete hope. By beginning where Horwath does—circa 1980, where the director’s first exposure to Fonda’s work came on a trip to Paris—and entwining it with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the White House, Fonda’s belated Oscars, and the audio of a revealing interview with Playboy magazine’s Lawrence Grobel, he immediately conjures up the feeling of a paradise lost, a nation set inexorably on an ever-darker path juxtaposed against a last bastion of hope almost faded away.

I was even more primed for Henry Fonda for President than normal, as I was enlisted by Jordan Cronk to transcribe his interview with Horwath for Film Comment. The conversation was much longer than space allowed for, but one tidbit that did make it in was the unavoidable comparison to and inspiration of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself; indeed, the legendary filmmaker came to the Los Angeles premiere of Horwath’s film. Certainly, there are many similarities to be found: an openly analytical, sociopolitical approach to cinephilia and the essay film, the three-hour runtime, the mix of film clips, footage shot on location at the sites of the former, and voiceover. That last point marks a fascinating point of divergence: Andersen’s is far more openly opinionated, witty, sarcastic, and somehow sincere in all the ways that make Los Angeles Plays Itself among the greatest of films, yet it was given by Encke King. Horwath speaks more neutrally but uses his own voice, and interweaves his own German words with Fonda’s recorded interview that asserts a certain objectivity, even as he makes all the logical assertions expected of an incisive scholar.

Henry Fonda for President is, of course, much closer to a biography of the legendary actor than it is a recounting of American history from the mid-1600s to 1981, but the latter is made possible by the sheer number of noteworthy films the former made that were strewn across time and brought to the forefront by Horwath’s generally chronological progression. Along the way, he makes some astonishing detours, including some brilliant digressions into Taxi Driver and Easy Rider, and while this does not quite possess the dynamism of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the steady, ruminative tone that Horwath establishes privileges the text and the man above all else. It is entirely to his credit that Horwath does not appear to ascribe to the clichéd notion of Fonda as simply an American paragon; his onscreen and personal lives are too multifaceted and anguished to support that kind of reading. Equally importantly, he still fully commits to the image of Fonda being proffered in a given text, incorporating the canonical films while also spending a surprising amount of time on lesser-known works, even giving over some of the most emotional cruxes to films like The Best Man and My Name Is Nobody. It is the kind of film that allows for, if not openly invites, room for extratextual associations: a brief interpolation of footage of elderly Fonda and John Ford revisiting the site of the final shot of Young Mr. Lincoln irresistibly brought to mind David Lynch’s portrayal of the latter in The Fabelmans, and I immediately became emotional in an entirely unexpected way.

Horwath’s own journey through America (mostly filmed at the tail end of the pandemic in 2021) doesn’t aim for the vibrancy of Deborah Stratman’s 16mm images in Los Angeles Plays Itself, but the separate immediacy of his HD digital video makes for a compelling contrast between the often variable sources of these entirely celluloid productions. The gulf in time is even greater, and even though Henry Fonda for President thankfully draws as few parallels to our current, analogous political situation as possible—some choice shots of a Trump impersonator dancing in Times Square, as part of a sequence that weaves together Fonda’s early Broadway success and Hamilton—the impression is of these places that, in some way or another, have largely fallen into a recursive image of themselves, a relatively young history nevertheless committed to a not unreasonable sense of self-preservation. Of course, the same is true of Fonda, and of Hollywood, and this brilliant film sees all of that with an inviting, ever-surprising eye.