The search for “origins” is, of course, to be avoided, but asserting that my lifelong interest in the US past and present, American cinema and its key players and actor Henry Fonda all represented essential reasons for me to try my hand at a new profession would hardly constitute a daring claim.
Yet this leap into making films is daring nonetheless. I decide to do it because film appeared to me the only logical way to approach the material that had piled up before me over decades. A lesson from my previous jobs: every subject you “take on” demands a specific means of realisation. Every set of questions—including the ones you ask of yourself—already to some extent contains the nature of the possible answer. Together with Michael Palm und Regina Schlagnitweit, I thus wanted to provides an answer by way of film. This answer perhaps resembles a double helix in spiralling motion: the biography of a composite named “Henry Fonda” and the “biography” of the United States of America.
Different thematic terrains and representational forms are superimposed onto one another here: fictional narratives and historical factors, individual life paths and socio--political speculation, moments from American history and their popular cultural “detritus”—and pressing questions that are addressed to democracy. Henry Fonda is the pilot of this endeavour. His life and that of his forefathers, the persona that emerges from his works, the times and places at which the person and the persona became active—all this carved out the lines in the sky over America that were then supposed to solidify and intertwine. The choice of the locations that we went to with the camera in 2019 and 2021 was a consequence of this. But their concrete form, their individual dynamics also set new impulses in motion in turn—new paths branching off to the side, new satellite figures, new connections and speculations.
Henry Fonda was a taciturn person. He didn’t see himself as an artist and didn’t like talking about himself. But he succeeded in bearing witness—even if he himself was not aware that he was doing so.
Thanks to his family history, his personal conflicts, weaknesses and convictions, his films and his specific abilities as an actor, Fonda also functions a bit like a zoom lens capable of capturing the most disparate dimensions of life and history in America thanks to its different focal lengths; sometimes just outlines, sometimes the most precise details. And thanks to his voice, which can also flow into proceedings via Lawrence Grobel’s long interview with him from summer 1981, he is also the second “narrator” of the film alongside me as the director.
Yet Henry Fonda was a taciturn person. He didn’t see himself as an artist and didn’t like talking about himself. But he succeeded in bearing witness—even if he himself was not aware that he was doing so. That’s what Hannah Arendt talks about at the start of my film and I’ve allowed myself to interpret it as a statement about Henry Fonda: “It is true that it is an individual subject who offers some objective work to the public, abandons it to the public. The subjective element, let us say the creative process that went into the work, does not concern the public at all. But if this work is not only academic, if it is also the result of ‘having proved oneself in life’, a living act and voice accompanies the work; the person himself appears together with it. What then emerges is unknown to the one who reveals it; he cannot control it.”
Alexander Horwath
Translation: James Lattimer
