How can home movies from Europe originally shot in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, become testimony to an entire way of life destroyed by war, Communism, and the politics of genocide?An interview with Péter Forgács about his astonishing compilation films explores the private history of peoples and nations "from below" and reveals the tone and texture of lives that perished or prevailed during decades of extraordinary tumult.

Dudley Andrew assesses structuralism, finds it insufficient, and proposes a new emphasis on a phenomenological hermeneutics.