These pictures were coming out of the projector, I couldn't even darken the room, I switched on the machine with trembling hands, it was an old machine, I remember, it had such a nice oily smell, nine-and-a-half mm film, I projected straight onto the wall, black-and-white figures were darting about, men and women, it was very short, and it wasn't long before the old film snapped, but I felt as if I had found the entrance to Aladdin's cave; this was the other language I wanted to be able to speak..."

The year was 1984 and Péter Forgács, a film-maker and performer operating outside the official cultural sphere, was looking at a reel on which Zoltán Bartos began to film his family in 1925. Forgács's Private Photo and Film Archive, a collection of old films made by non-professionals, had been in existence for two years. His venture had two antecedents: the Horus Archive, a collection of photographs taken by unknown amateurs, which were in some way interesting (e.g. botched), and the film Private History, by Gábor Bódy and Péter Timár, which used archive film to provide an unprecedented and apocryphal view of the past. These antecedents were vital for Péter Forgács to recognize just what it was he was seeing as he watched the pictures made by Zoltán Bartos.

Everyone knows the material of these amateur films (identical to that in family photo albums): weddings, birthdays, Christmas, episodes in a child's life, summer holidays; one or two shots of something interesting in the outside world, perhaps an airship, or a procession; very occa-sionally, and perhaps unbeknown to the photographer, they record events of major historical significance: the assassination of an American president, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, or a military occupation. These objets trouvés are the raw material of Péter Forgács's films. How then can somone be called a film director when he has not shot a single frame himself, a man whose work relies solely on pictures made by others?

Private films of the past then were not the leisurely affairs that modern home videos are; by the time you realize what you are watching, the film has switched to another scene, in another time and place, and (to an extent) with different people. In these black-and-white silent films, total strangers go hither and thither, the time and place are unknown to us; we have no idea who is who, what their relationships are to each other, or why they do whatever it is they are doing.

Forgács decided to go over these pictures with a fine comb and make them reveal the stories within, to piece together a picture of what happened to people from this jumble of the scraps of their lives. He set himself to creating the Bartos family saga, recounting the tale of Dusi and Jenő's romance, unmasking the secret desires of Mr G. or writing the diary that the baroness very carelessly omitted to keep.

The series, Privát Magyarország (Private Hungary), eleven films in total, does not quite manage to do all this. In the first film, A Bartos család (The Bartos Family), completed in 1988, the extraordinary power and fascination of these pictures becomes clear. They conjure up and bring to life something that is not there (any longer). We are aware that everything we are seeing in these pictures was once alive and now is no more. The individuals have either died or grown old; the town, the flower-garden, the country house, none of them are the same. This sense of transience casts a peculiar light on everything, and lends weight to banal events. There they are before us, palpably real, these people who are no longer alive, released from the power of time, and they are looking back at us.

Péter Forgács turned Zoltán Bartos's film into a family saga. He tells the story using the missing pieces (the silences), and one senses that it is moving inexorably towards a sad end. The Bartos family were wealthy, though not immensely wealthy residents of Pest; they owned a lumberyard and sawmill, held lively family get-togethers, and in summer they left their city-centre, and moved to the country; they buy a car, take trips abroad; the two older boys turn their attention to pretty girls, the youngest prepares for his school leaving certificate... Meanwhile, their mother is buried, and an elegant woman who appeared in earlier pictures turns up in a new role alongside the father—and how lovingly Zoltán's camera photographs his brother's beautiful bride! Life bustles along, the thirties give way to the forties; the idyll comes to a brutal end. In succession, the anti-Jewish laws were promulgated, the Bartos family lost their business, the boys were hauled off into forced labour, where the second of them dies. Zoltán survives, but his filming becomes less and less frequent, and less pleasurable. In 1955, the camera runs out of film once and for all.

The second film in Private Hungary, Dusi and Jenő, is a portrayal of a childless, Catholic couple who live a quiet life; there is no large family, no bustling activity in their case. Jenő films the intimate moments of their life together, or saunters through the town on his own, but mainly he prefers to film his immediate surroundings in great detail, the old Krisztina district nestling at the foot of the Castle in Buda, the small shops and workshops along Attila Road, the couple's ground-floor apartment, the dog so much adored by Dusi. She herself sitting by the window with stripes of oblique light falling on her from outside, the room half in darkness. A turbulent Danube, a flock of seagulls with the silhouette of the Chain Bridge rising out of the fog; heavy snowfall, flurries of snowflakes, the wind driving snow down Attila Road. During the war their house received a direct hit; the lone figure of a man is seen clambering among the ruins; he picks a book out of the debris, dusts it down. Then we see Dusi in her new home. Once always elegant and well-kept—her wardrobe, though not large, had a few well-made dresses of good-quality material, worn as the season and occasion demanded—now Dusi looks downtrodden and dowdy, although the handsome fur coat and the once-fashionable negligée are still there. In the last pictures of her, the face we see is unsmiling and crushed. Jenő had put a new reel in his camera: instead of the brooding, foggy city of autumn and winter, he photographed sunlit landscapes, and was married for the second time, to a small, plump woman. He started a new life, and left the old one behind with the film.

The sheer poetry of Dusi and Jenő is accentuated by Tibor Szemző‘s music. Szemző is a regular partner of Forgács's, composing the soundtracks for his films; what he creates is not the conventional musical backdrop, setting the mood for the film, but a musical space in which the images can unfold. This music, based on delicate, repetitive movements, picks up the rhythm of the film and provides a kind of counterpoint to it, helping to shape its rhythm. Longing, melancholy, the pain and foreboding that go with loss. After the war we once again see middle-class people who used to live quite happily, in harmony with their surroundings. They were trying to continue their lives where they had left off, but by the time they could gather their wits, a new and far from brave world had taken up root in the wreckage of the old and was triumphantly settling in for a long stay. The basis of their lives had gone, the frame had broken and they now stood there crushed and destitute, they had lost everything that had held them together. Today's viewer knows all this in advance, while they are still nonchalantly dancing, laughing and flirting; instead of envying them their happiness or their prosperity, we can only watch their ingeniousness with an aching heart. One's instinct is to cry out to them to wake up, to run away, to tell them that they are only a few days (or months or years) away from forced labour, the deportations, the siege, conscription, the bombing, then nationalization, exile, labour camps.

The film made by the Szeged socialite, György Pető, seems almost irrepressible in its good-humour (Az örvény, Free Fall). Women's smiles radiate, jewels glitter and wine sparkles in glass goblets. Wasn't it a great stroke of luck that they were able to transfer the lucrative family business to the name of their Aryan brother-in-law! A company of forced labourers marches by; Jews—doctors, engineers, musicians—digging a ditch under the lax supervision of good-humoured NCOs; in the time allowed to them for rest one plays music, another films... Gyuri is allowed home for a holiday, he gets married; in 1943 little Andris is born (and perishes at the age of one in a concentration camp along with half the members of the family). The overflowing joyfulness and frenetic joie de vivre of this film was too much for Forgács too. Free Fall is the film in which the director has intervened most. In the earlier films, he confined himself largely to making fairly minor changes, speeding up or slowing the pace down a little, or lingering on particular images; sometimes he has touched in some colour to the black-and-white images, added in background sounds or snippets of conversation, or interposed an occasional subtitle providing factual information. In this instance, however, Forgács commissioned Tibor Szemzô to set the anti-Jewish laws to music. These specimens of utter insanity, couched in the language of bureaucracy, are sung in Gregorian chant as a background to the film's blissful and frivolous images.

Ismeretlen háború (An Unknown War)is a joint venture: German, Dutch and Belgian film-makers worked with Péter Forgács in putting together a film out of the same archive of 50 hours-worth of material filmed by various cameramen in many different places, from London to Athens, the Ukraine to France, during the years of the Second World War. These amateur films tell a very different story to that told by contemporary newsreels, real or fabricated, that the war correspondents put together. They mostly show life in the hinterland and in the majority of the pictures one can hardly tell that there is a war going on, or that the film is being made in a country at war or in an occupied country. Forgács is even less interested than the others in the goings-on of battle; he is in search of simultaneity. The title of his film is Miközben valahol, 1940–43 (Meanwhile Somewhere, 1940–43 in the An Unknown War series, a co-production with RTBF, La Camera). As dark masses of people wearing yellow stars are forced onto cattle-trucks, in Lisbon the crowds at a bullfight cheer wildly; as the starving take to the streets in occupied Greece and are mowed down in their dozens, in Belgium a family is having afternoon tea, with coffee, cakes and drinks, and papa lights up a cigar. In Prague a baby is born, in Szeged somebody (Gyuri Pető—of Free Fall) is taking photographs of a naked woman, in Poland a Polish girl and a German boy have their heads shaved and are subjected to public humiliation for "criminal miscegenation".

In A dunai exodus (The Danube Exodus,1998, winner of the prize for best documentary at the 1999 Hungarian Film Week), history provides the conclusion to the events that the director shows in parallel: Captain Andrásovits, captain of the river boat, the Queen Elizabeth, is commissioned in two consecutive years to take first a transport of Jews from Bratislava and then Germans from Bessarabia. In the German Reich and in Poland, concentration camps had already been set up; the Zionists were organizing to take the Jews to Palestine—flying in the face of the whole world. The smaller part of the world was on the side of the Germans; the larger was on the side of the Allies, and the Arab population of Palestine, then a British mandate, was protesting against the settlement of Jews. The Queen Elizabeth and the Czar Dusan are held up for nearly a month at Russe in Bulgaria without being granted permission either to dock or to continue their journey. They run out of bread, they have no drinking water left and until the very last minute it is doubtful whether the venture will be successful, or whether they will be turned back to be sent to a certain death, as was the case with most of these transports, whether by ship or overland. In the images we see no trace of all this; the women peel potatoes, the orthodox Jews pray, the younger folk organize dances, romantic liaisons take shape; one couple gets married. They spend their wedding night in the captain's cabin… Meanwhile, the Zionist leaders are traipsing from office to office, they pay out huge sums in bribes, and the Queen Elizabeth eventually makes it to the Black Sea.

It is ironic that these Jews had better luck than the Bessarabian Germans, members of the "master race", who found themselves dispossessed and homeless three times in the space of a few years. After Stalin and Hitler had carved up the Baltic countries and Poland between them, and Bessarabia was annexed by the Soviets, whole hordes of people changed nationality or place of residence. The Germans left everything behind: land, homes, livestock, and taking with them only a little hand luggage, set out to seek a new home in what they believed to be the land of milk and honey, Germany. What in fact lay in store for them was a couple of years in reception camps, then resettlement in houses from which Poles had been expelled. They did not have the time to get used to their new surroundings before they were evacuated to Germany from the fighting line, once again losing everything they possessed. This time, however, only the women, children and the elderly were at home; the men had all been sent to fight; hardly any of them survived. Of course none of this is shown—it could not have been—in Captain Andrásovits' s pictures. We see only faces, that of a frightened child, an anxious woman, a bewildered young conscript. Meanwhile, the boat continues on its way... engine chugging, paddle churning water, the great river making waves, landscapes move on both banks. It was always the festivities, the happy times, that prompted the amateur film-makers to switch on their cameras; they virtually only shot the sunnier side of life. Péter Forgács's direction and Tibor Szemző‘s soundtrack do not detract from this, they do not take away their happiness. In re-creating the films as elegy, the message that comes across to the viewer is one which the family photographer could not even have had an inkling of. Only time, only the passage of time has made it possible.