Ideas Take Flight
Part 2: Cross-Media Communication
Welcome back to part II of Anand Sudha’s new reading of auteur film criticism. Today, he digs into Alexander Horwath’s 2024 essay film Henry Fonda for President, which screened last week via Le Cinema Club.
And don’t forget that after our packed screening of Kiss Me Deadly, tickets are now available for Carnival of Souls on March 20th.
Ideas Take Flight: Auteurist Criticism and Henry Fonda for President
Part 2: Cross-Media Communication
The perils of auteurist criticism don’t necessarily stem from a lack of trying. More often than not, the choice or combination of approaches discussed in part 1 are governed by the magazine rather than the critic. This is especially true when auteurist essays are centred around a theme, which range from the modest to the grand. The “modest” includes topics such as framing, mise-en-scene, shot composition or something incredibly specific pejoratively relegated to the inaccessible realms of esoterica, such as Adrian Martin’s piece on characters exiting buildings in Becker’s films, while character psychology, “human condition” (whatever that means) or sociopolitical scenarios and histories form the fabric of the “grand”. These latter contextual pieces are the domain of the “classical” approach, and by extension, more widely published, as in this essay on Jia Zhangke and China’s transformations, with plot and biographical detail acquiring the centre stage here even as the critic expounds on an auteur’s formal choices. The troubles of humanity cannot be trifled with through centring cinematic technique, it seems.
Criticism’s roots are not firmly grounded by the medium alone, and just like other art forms, it can easily extend its branches into political and historical spheres which might be dated linearly, but are experienced non-linearly. Here is exactly where the chronological sprawl of the classical approach meets the associative flights of the associative. Chronology provides the structural grounding to anchor the overlying history(ies) and politics, while a freely associative interpretative mode allows one to pluck films from the cinematic ether. Essayistic forms need to account for the elasticity of historical memory and its fragmentary (re)appearances, and cinema’s spatiotemporal malleability when critics expound on an auteur and their grand themes.
However, when we shift our medium of auteurist criticism to the cinema, the plot-centric linearity of the classical approach, though indeed pleasurable, is not as strong a use of the potentiality of the cinematic medium, as a theme often sparks associations from the cinematic unconscious that a good director cannot repress. Therefore, the lucid, hybrid approach to auteur studies often finds fruit in cinema itself. Perhaps the critic and curator, Alexander Horwath, whose curations themselves are famed for their unique pairings, wanted to go even further by elucidating both his theme and auteur in Henry Fonda for President (2024, from now called HFFP), not one through the lens of the other, but as a feedback loop which constantly shifts the meanings of both.
Horwath’s familiarity with criticism allows him to blend the best of different essayistic approaches, something which cinema permits more readily than the written medium, in his multi-layered critique of Fonda as an auteur and the “quintessential American.” Horwath proceeds with a near chronological approach to Fonda’s biography (“classical”), from his Dutch ancestors to his honorary Oscar, while organising his films not according to their year of release, but largely by the period they are set in and their thematic resonances (“associative”). Developing an essay through cinema not only allows the opportunity to (re)experience the films in question but also allows thematic resonances to commingle through what Rosenbaum terms as “indexing” , where scenes from different films are piled up together to let them interact through the theme and motif being discussed. This is a method that has its similarities to essays written on genre or based on a particular trend, where strikingly dissimilar films are brought together to illuminate on aesthetic/commercial /sociopolitical themes (eg: Robin Wood’s ‘Return of The Repressed’).
Cinematically, however, Horwath’s HFFP is clearly an inheritor of both Mark Rappaport, whose essay films on actors Jean Seberg and Rock Hudson also link the actors’ image to other films not involving them and sociopolitical scenarios, and Thom Andersen, whom Horwath cites as an influence. But neither of these two directors can be considered as outsiders with regard to their cinematic subjects. Horwath’s outsider angle certainly imposes a mystique on the celebrity personas of Hollywood stars who formed a major portion of his cinephilia, and thereby becomes a major cinematic question, as many American directors constantly engage with and reframe the star personas when constructing their films. Therefore, Horwath’s essay film becomes a disquisition on the contradictions raised by a seemingly simple question which forms its organising principle: What does it even mean to be a quintessential American?
The slipperiness of the term constantly reshapes and is being reshaped by the films and images, and Horwath, instead of suppressing the multidirectional complexities his stream of words and images raises in favour of an airtight structure, backtracks and flashes-forward to films already discussed and films which do not fit the biographical period in Fonda’s/America’s history, treating his film as a means of discovery and reassessment similar to Manny Farber’s brief interlude of bullet points when writing on Don’t Look Now (1975). Horwath accommodates micro-questions and themes emerging from multiple directions into his form without seeking to provide the final word on the subject, reminding us that criticism is a welter of multiple lenses – objective and subjective – biases, facts and fictions, where moulding them into a discernible structure doesn’t necessarily mean flattening and force-fitting discontinuities.
The sheer scope of his subject(s) cannot be limited to Fonda’s films alone, and like the best criticism, Horwath interrupts the flow of clips to interrogate his question and clarify his limitations and biases. In the case of HFPP, Horwath cannot ignore American history. Therefore, like Rosenbaum bringing his experiences of visiting the sets of Gohatto (1999) and Oshima’s talk-show duties while discussing his auteur status, Horwath overlays his personal history of his encounters with Fonda’s films on the clips while relating to Fonda’s history, which he then maps onto (inter)national history itself. But history itself is an act of recollection, and to penetrate the mystique of the past, Horwath summons its spectres in the present through footage of the hallowed cinematic locations shot by him and his collaborators, Regina Schlagnitweit and Michael Palm, only to find its traces contained in transformed vessels and spaces (the pulpit of the pilgrims is housed in a church that bears no resemblance to its European origins). HFPP becomes a blend of historical fact and fiction, just like the cinema itself, where John Ford’s mythologised history in My Darling Clementine (1946) manifests as a kitschy pageant in Tombstone, Arizona. It’s almost as if the past is interacting with fiction through art, as Horwath overlays Fonda’s dialogues on the present-day locations of his films – echoes of a cinema and sentiment, not lost, but reconfigured to the shifting socio-economic transformations of our era. The role of a critic engaging with a past auteur, regardless of the medium, isn’t merely a matter of eloquence and research, but also an act of interrogation and intervention of their personality and environment.
In this vein, Horwath emphasises his “foreignness” to both his subject and auteur in a manner similar to critics approaching foreign directors through national correlatives. However, the complexities introduced by celebrity, history and the sheer sprawl of his theme forces Horwath to stretch his arms into places criticism seldom goes to. Horwath’s Fonda obsession is both out of time and place, assembled from interviews, critical pieces, news articles and the cinema, and is neither in sync with the American people of then and now. This spatiotemporal displacement manifests not only in Horwath’s narration in German for a project which is “quintessentially American”, but also in his alien, oneiric landscapes that sometimes necessitate Fonda’s dialogues to anchor him in those transformed spaces. Landscapes which seemed so momentous in cinematic retellings of American history are seemingly populated only by alienated motels and gas stations. This outsider lens of America shows how “mere” works of art can bridge worlds – historical and fictional – while muddying them through our subjectivities and the sociopolitical contexts. HFPP is a chronicling of histories in all their contradictions and forms, and all this stems from asking a rather simple question.
HFPP has been rightfully heralded as an insightful critique of Fonda’s films and choices, a document of “real” histories warped by the “reel”, and a Tocqueville-style travelogue. In addition to these, HFPP is also an exemplary reminder of the breadth of topics that “trifles” like cinephilia and criticism can encompass, how questions regarding the medium and its artists can extend beyond our self-contained formulas. Jonathan Rosenbaum frequently alludes to the outlook of cinema as “literature by other means” in France. While there is the sense that this quote simplifies the complexities of the medium, the sentiment informs my ways of looking at criticism, with the hope that the quote is equally applicable in the reverse. If some of the finest essay films on auteurs have taken inspiration from great film writers, then one can hope that these essay films also transform our ways of thinking and approaching auteurist essays.
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