Fellini's imagination is inexhaustible. He rarely uses scripts, but follows his own inspiration from moment to moment to decide what sequence to adopt, working out the details, via facendo, as he goes along.

What emerges is the full and varied complexity of modern life. The existential noia, the lethargy of man face to face with his reconstituted tabula rasa, is but a single moment, a small corner of that life. Fellini does not dissipate his artistic energies in the desperate task of trying to extract meaning out of a meaningless existence. The existential theme is there, not as a philosophical axiom, but as a subtle epiphany which illuminates the vast canvas at key moments. The naive prostitute, the pimp, the aristocratic dandies, the corrupt society women, the humanitarian writer, the shrewd peasant, the pathetic yet laughter-provoking idiot, the suicide, the insensitive cruel children, the everyday saints, the callous men and women who know how and where to pick their ripe pleasures, the bigots who pray for the salvation of others; the secularism of priests who have lost sight of their divine mission, the self-effacing beauty of the pure-hearted—all are depicted with human compassion and understanding in what T. S. Eliot has described as the dramatic objectivity of the "third voice of poetry."

In the end, Fellini too shows the false values of the world to be self-destructive. There is perhaps a greater feeling of despair in his films than in Antonioni's, because the loss can be measured against an articulate reality. The realization of the meaning of love, in La Strada, is felt to be hopeless precisely because it rises from a powerful contrast between the man's rough indifference and the girl's inexpressible sympathy; the abandonment in La Dolce Vita is felt all the more keenly in the insistence with which Fellini draws the nostalgic yearning of the hero to lose himself in some all-consuming faith; in Nights of Cabiria, simple childlike trust though crushed by petty interests and deceit seems somehow to rise above its humiliation. Fellini's stories strike deep in the human soul; his characters cast a haunting spell over us. We are painfully aware of hard truths in the midst of commonplaces, of noble spirits touching, for a moment, spiritual depravity and illuminating with sudden insight ordinary, everyday events. The procession in La Strada, like Dante's pageant at the top of Purgatory, is recognizable in all its details, but the final effect is strange and nightmarish; the all-night orgy in La Dolce Vita is, in its isolated moments, perfectly clear, but the surrealistic Matelda-like encounter at the end, jolts us into perplexity; the scene between the prostitute and the magician in Nights of Cabiria seems perfectly commonplace as we see it unfold, but inserts itself into our troubled consciousness later. (pp. 563-64)

In 8 1/2 we see the drama of life with all its confusion of values, its pain, its sordid pleasures, its human mistakes, the short-lived joys which haunt the memory but can never be recaptured. The innocent love of the past and the rote-like lust of the present are shown side by side in an expressive juxtaposition that is grim and sad and beautiful all at once. (p. 564)