Film bequeaths a kind of immortality, whether the figure on screen is Cary Grant in his virile prime or one of the anonymous cast of thousands in a Cecil B. DeMille epic.

For more than 25 years, Hungarian video artist Péter Forgács has been excavating and restoring home movies of 20th-century European Jews. In bringing these casual portraits of everyday life to public view, Forgács resuscitates the spirits and honors the memories of those who perished in the Holocaust.

Forgács’ ambitious upcoming installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, “Letters to Afar,” doesn’t explicitly reference the genocide in Eastern Europe. But it doesn’t need to.

“It’s always with us that they die,” he said, describing the experience of watching anyone in an old movie. “But it’s a different way [that] we look at old films, old pictures in this [installation], because their way of passing on was a brutal, sadistic torture.”

Film clip “Kolbuszowa” shows life in 1920s and ’30s Poland, in “Letters to Afar” exhibit photo/courtesy yivo institute for jewish research

The six hours of source material that Forgács fashioned into the installation, which opens Thursday, Feb. 26, consists of films shot by Jews who had already immigrated to the United States and returned to Poland to visit their families and hometowns in the 1920s and ’30s. The original footage is housed in the collection of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, which commissioned “Letters to Afar” with the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The material dates to a time when the primitive past was still in plain sight and the horrible future lay beyond the horizon.

“We know little things about these people,” Forgács said in a Skype conversation from his Budapest home. “But when we see them, we don’t have to read history books to [recognize] a small shtetl street somewhere in Poland. We don’t see telephone posts or electricity poles. It’s not only a crazy time capsule to the ’30s, but at the moment when the camera opens up for us this whole thing we see something that was there for a hundred years before.”

Forgács is describing life as it was lived, and he revels in sharing it with museumgoers — life, it should be noted, not death.

“We see their movement, their emotions, the shyness of the Orthodox Jew or the [sexiness] of a young woman,” he said. “It’s absolutely just an update as it would be yesterday, here in my neighborhood. It’s all together.”

While most films follow a linear construct, with a beginning and an end, “Letters to Afar” is an immersive installation composed of 13 screens, each with a different clip that runs on a loop. Forgács’ intent with this “wandering cinema” is to conjure a larger picture of a community from the individual pieces.

“What I’m offering is a very rich, huge thing,” he said, “because if you look at all six hours, you are in a long, long, long opera in a way. It’s a kind of freedom that I feel is opposite to a film.”

To that end, Forgács devoted extraordinary attention to the sound design for “Letters to Afar.”

“This is one space with different sound zones,” he explained. “There are barriers and borders of different sounds, so there’s a kind of floating on the whole like you’re in a crowded peasants’ marketplace in Poland. There’s a murmur.”

Forgács’ vision of evoking a population in midstride and midbreath, as it were, precluded any kind of mournful or melancholy musical accompaniment. He collaborated with Lorin Sklamberg and Frank London of the Klezmatics, who complied with Forgács’ request that they record every track of their compositions separately and not mix them.

“They gave me the free hand to use the very thin, very light, almost inaudible scores,” Forgács said appreciatively.

As a result, “Letters to Afar” is contemplative rather than didactic, experiential rather than educational, conveying Forgacs’ respect for the viewer.

“I don’t want to sell [or push] it,” he said. “You are my guest. You’re a visitor. But I don’t give you any conclusion. Just the facts: the date, the place, the name.”

“Letters to Afar,” Feb. 26–May 24 at Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., S.F. www.thecjm.org