ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a few reflections and some deeper historical principles that emerge when individual interpretations of the national films are considered together. Phantom films magnify historical experience at many different levels and on many different scales, the individual, the collective, the societal, and the cultural. Smail argues that historical experience for human beings is actually a "dialogue between an organism and its environment." This is a central tenet of the concept of the theory of "coevolution," which explains human behavior as a product of interacting yet distinct evolutionary processes; genetics and culture form an ecosystem wherein changes to one process influence the other. A phantom travels across generations and across cultures. It is quiescent as long as its secret remains secure, and emerges when its secret is threatened; it can lie dormant for generations, or haunt generations consecutively.
