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.

You can read part I here.

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.