Henry Fonda for President

Probably the best film I've seen at the 74. Berlinale, definitely the most interesting. It was made by Alexander Horwath, the former director of the Austrian Film Museum among other things, and you can see his expertise of cinema history in every minute of this essay. However, Henry Fonda for President isn't limited to the history of film, it connects the life of Henry Fonda and his movies with the history of the USA in a congenial way, from the 16th century until today.

Horwath said in the interview that his first version was 6+ hours long, but he and his editor and cameraman Michael Palm condensed it really efficiently, the film takes its time for every Fonda movie but never gets boring despite its three hours runtime.

Horwath is a great film historian and a regular presenter of the Oscar's. His ample knowledge of Fonda's and Ford's movies apparently forced him to play tribute to his heros and make them the backbone of US history. The problem with all this was that the biography of a single actor can't explain a whole nation, even if in this special case he has acted some of its most important politicians.

I understand a historian's ambition but the historian in Horwath should have realized that his end ever was doomed from the be3. Regardless of using 6 hours of his material or "just" the final three. With all his tricks in finding references in almost every clip to his hero's true nature and the history of the US, you can't use any line in a 12h interview to explain everything. He should have trusted Fonda himself, repeatedly saying" no" to suggestions of his interviewer and falling back to being just an actor saying his lines.