The film begins with a personal memory: Paris, summer of 1980. The Moscow Olympics are underway. In Detroit, Ronald Reagan has just been nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. In New Hampshire, Henry Fonda is shooting his final film. Two actors sketch out two different ways of viewing the United States of America: as God’s Own Country or as a stage for social struggle.
A sharp leap backwards: Holland, 1651. A dual history of migration takes its course: the story of a man and his family – and the history of a nation in motion. The film’s journey continues to the shores of the Mohawk River and the years of the American Revolution, to the “Wild West” and the waves of racist violence in the early 20th century, to New York during the Great Depression, to Hiroshima and the Pacific Front in Wold War II. The postwar era and its new forms of depression, the Cold War and its apocalyptic scenarios–this is also the time when the society of the spectacle finally asserts itself.
Our protagonist is now closer than ever to the role of a politician. The story comes to a close around 1976: after Watergate and the Vietnam War, during a time of confusion and hope in which the U.S. is trying to find itself again.
Each station on this journey through the country and its times is connected to Henry Fonda–to his life and that of his forebears, to his work as an actor and his public persona, and to the movie characters he portrayed. He becomes concentrated in them – along with the country from which all of these faces arise. Considered from the vantage point of today: another time, another country. But its phantoms, no matter if famous or nameless, are more potent than ever before.