In a dark apartment in Tokyo, a lonely woman is transported to the snowy vistas of Minnesota. She gets lost in the fuzzy images on her TV, fast-forwarding, rewinding and pausing, searching for clues and meaning. When the worn-out tape is snarled in her VCR, she pulls the unspooled mess into her face and inhales reverently.

It’s not long before she is on a plane headed to America, hunting for the booty that Steve Buscemi buried in “Fargo,” the 1996 film that she scrutinizes as if it were real. (In her defense, that Coen brothers’ award winner did claim to be based on a true story, even though it wasn’t.) As playfully asserted by the new film “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” a fantasia inspired by an urban myth, the title character (Rinko Kikuchi) has the power to make something real out of something fake — to remake and refashion the movie in her own image. It’s just the latest exploration of how modern humans have adapted their imaginations and identities in response to the recorded image. Movies play host to our fantasy lives and can even transform and define our day-to-day — at least according to the movies themselves.

From Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Bogie-ness in “Breathless” to Marlon Brando’s self-conscious channeling of his own “Godfather” performance in “The Freshman,” there’s a long tradition of movies summoning and reappropriating their forebears. (Though not summoning any specific movies, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.” and “The Last Action Hero” famously explored the porosity of the screen, and our need to transgress, and commune with, what’s up there.) There’s an echo chamber aspect to this, but such conjuring also has the potential to make the movies seem more emotionally resonant and real. In “Sleepless in Seattle,” the characters are entranced by “An Affair to Remember,” making their romance seem less fictional in light of it.