The Nation : Moving Images Created a Land of Endless Possibility : Culture: For Fellini, as for many people of his generation, America and its movies were the same. Image and reality were inextricably entwined.

While accepting an honorary Oscar earlier this year, Federico Fellini, the brilliant Italian filmmaker who died last Sunday, paid tribute to the American movies of his youth--and, by extension, to America itself. “I come from a country, and I belong to a generation,” he said, “for which America and the movies were almost the same thing.”

Though Fellini may have put it more succinctly than most, his has been a common sentiment--one that foreign filmmakers as diverse as Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and Francois Truffaut have expressed. For them, and for millions of their countrymen, the United States would always be viewed through the prism of its movies.

In practice this meant that America, particularly the America of the ‘30s and ‘40s, would be refracted into a series of film images. Foreigners would talk about the glamour of American movies, the romance, the adventure, the overwhelming sense of transport--and then attribute these same qualities to the country. They would talk as well about more homespun truths: about the permeability of class in our movies, about the pervasive sense of community and love, about the strength of values and the celebration of ordinary people--and these, too, would become inseparable from the country itself.

None of this, of course, had much to do with real, quotidian America, especially the Depression America of the ‘30s--whose films Fellini cut his teeth on. There were no poor people in those movies, except in an occasional Warner Bros. picture. There were no economic royalists to put the lie to the fiction of social mobility--at least none that couldn’t be converted into social democrats. There were few blacks, few Jews, few ethnics of any sort. There were few forays into the grim realities of joblessness and guilt, few problems that were truly intractable.

Nor were ordinary Americans much like Jimmy Cagney, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis or the dozens of other stars by whom our movies were and are known. These were people who lived by style, who forged themselves into archetypes of energy, manliness, power, beauty, grace and decency, while Americans off-screen suffered and struggled without the benefit of style. Yet, the images and the stars overpowered the reality until, for most foreigners--and for some Americans, too--they became the reality: the United Images of America.

Of course, Fellini and his filmmaking confreres had national cinemas of their own, albeit much smaller than the Hollywood colossus--but in none of their countries could it be said that the nation was the sum of its cinematic parts as it was here. They had too many other traditions to look to for national identity. But America was newer and fresher. In fact, the creation of America through the movies was one of the prime motives for the old Eastern European-born Jewish movie moguls who founded the industry. Through their movies, they could erect a new America to place alongside the old, nativist one that had excluded them. At the same time, by glorifying this cluster of fictions, they could prove just how American they were.

The kinds of images they chose, both those of rarefied glamour and down-home domesticity, may have connected with the rest of the world precisely because they were idealizations that had much less to do with America specifically than with a sense of possibility generally. Everyone from an Italian villager like the young Fellini to a Japanese peasant to an African tribesman could identify with the heightened unreality of our films. They still do. America exports dreams of wealth, power and love the way the Swiss export watches. It is what we do best.

If foreigners never seemed terribly discriminating when it came to American movies, if they tended to love them uncritically, it may have been because the images, indelible as some of them are, were ultimately less powerful than the idea behind the movies. Or put another way, the images followed from the idea--so even bad movies retained a residual force they may not seem to have earned. The idea, perhaps as fundamental to us as the Declaration of Independence, is that America can spring full-blown from the movies. American can be, has been, anything the movies want it to be.

For an artist, this can be an irresistible notion--no doubt one reason why so many foreign directors have cited American movies as an influence, even when their own films bear little resemblance to ours. It is no less irresistible for ordinary viewers. Again and again, what one sees within American films of the 1930s and ‘40s is the glorious idea of possibility given visual and narrative form. To generalize grossly:

In American movies, stars predominate as in no other national cinema because the individual is the measure of possibility.

In American movies, the hero, through courage or ingenuity or goodness or talent, usually imposes his will on his world the way the filmmakers impose theirs on the movie.

In American movies, action is usually the sustaining force because we believe that from action comes results.

In American movies, a premium is placed on scale because there is no limit to the dreams we have.

In American movies, especially those of the ‘30s and ‘40s, things usually turn out well or the films end with such stylized, cathartic melodrama that they make us feel as if they’ve turned out justly.

These may be the basic precepts of America on screen, but there was one additional element suffusing them all--one that also conveyed a palpable sense of Americanness to the rest of the world. Fellini once said that when he thought about Americans, he thought about Fred Astaire and Alice Faye. It seems an improbable combination, peerless Astaire and light Faye, but Fellini was on to something by conflating Astaire’s effortlessness with Faye’s artlessness.

It has always been a virtue of American movies that they seem to be both effortless and artless--easily made and aspiring to nothing more than entertainment. This, indeed, is their spirit, a kind of lovely, naive mindlessness that had clearly cast its enchantment on Fellini and his generation. Other countries can imitate it, as we see in the gangster yakuza pictures of Japan, the costume dramas of India, the spaghetti Westerns of Italy. None can ever quite replicate it. It is part of who we are as Americans, at least as movie Americans. It is part of what is so appealing about us to foreigners, who are often burdened with far more deliberate attitudes toward life and art.

At the time when Fellini was first enjoying our movies, there was little thought in Hollywood of globalization, though the studios operated an international distribution system, and little thought in other countries of cultural colonization. Today, Hollywood thinks of little else, and some foreign filmmakers are calling for a restriction of American imports for fear of losing their own national identities.

But what Fellini and other filmmakers of his now-passing generation knew is that the power of American movies wasn’t a matter of imperialism. Deep down, I suspect they knew that America was not really a physical place but a global fantasy--a world that belonged to everyone because it was a world where anything could be easily and artlessly imagined into being.