Alexis de Tocqueville observed that ‘we can consider the moment of the election of the president [of the United States] as a moment of national crisis’. Far from the idea of a ‘celebration of democracy’, this thesis suggests that, with so many internal and external fractures at stake, American democracy faces a critical occasion at every election.

American cinema has followed these occasions with interest and vivacity, between idealism and cynicism. The cycle ‘All the President's Men’ proposes eight looks at the electoral or legislative process in the United States, from Frank Capra's pessimistic optimism in 1939 to Frederick Wiseman's uncommented portrait in 2018 of the deep America that led, without almost anyone having anticipated it, to Trump's victory.

Between these two dates, we will also see the corruption of power in Robert Rossen, the celebrity candidate in Elia Kazan, macarthyism in Emile de Antonio, political maneuvering in Franklin J. Shaffner, the Watergate scandal in Alan J. Pakula and the allegory of Reaganism in John Carpenter.

The opening session, with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, will be preceded by a conversation with Maria Filomena Molder, who will question a hypothesis formulated by J. Hoberman, an American critic who has studied the relationship between cinema and politics in the United States: ‘a film is political not just because of what it shows, but because of what it does’.

Pedro Mexia