An earlier, wordless encounter with a clown in the town square in broad daylight was “like a herald of my future.” At about nine, Fellini displayed a talent for making puppets—“cardboard with heads of clay”—and, still hiding his shyness, he staged puppet spectacles in which he played all the parts. His lifelong affinity for clowns—“these grotesque, offbeat versions of drunkards, gossipmongers, tramps”—carries over into all the dissolute, disrespectable, lost, or fumbling men and women scattered throughout his movies. As in La strada and Variety Lights—his first feature, codirected with Alberto Lattuada in 1950—Fellini’s protagonists tend to be show people, ragtag performers, childlike vagabonds, alone if not explicitly orphaned, weary and disillusioned purveyors of enchantment. And Fellini insists that such enchantment is, ultimately, real—substantial enough to offset the darkness hovering just beyond his characters’ dim yet undefeated hopefulness.

And so a consideration of dreams and reality is inescapable when thinking about the places these films take us. “I see no dividing line between imagination and reality,” Fellini asserted often enough, and within the open structures of his stories we find imagination and reality like facing pages in a book, or like rippling concentric circles in a well, circles overlapping as they shimmer forward and back.

Young Fellini’s most notable, essential, and practical talent was for cartooning. When he found his way to Rome at age eighteen, the monsters and naked women that had filled his school notebooks morphed into professionally generated caricatures for diners at Roman restaurants and cafés, and he scored work writing and illustrating for Marc’Aurelio, Italy’s chief humor magazine. In time, at the end of World War II, he hit upon a lucrative source of supplementary income by creating the Funny Face Shop—a place he described as being “like I imagined the western saloon in Hollywood films”—where he charged flush American soldiers for fast, goofy portraits to send to folks back home. It was here, in a fateful first encounter, that Roberto Rossellini visited the twenty-four-year-old Fellini and recruited him to work on screenplays for films that would revolutionize world cinema: Rome Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). (Rossellini initially, opportunistically, also asked Fellini to introduce him to his friend Aldo Fabrizi, hoping the actor’s participation could secure financing for the first project. All the same, Rossellini discovered in the caricaturist a writer who was sensitive to reality, and their collaboration was remarkably substantial and sustained.)

Fellini was never a political animal, but Fascism, the ravages of World War II, and the deep shadows they cast on all aspects of daily life cannot be deducted from the otherwise cheerful catalog of his early influences. Amid the candid and mischievous quips in his extensive interviews, occasional glimpses of anguish rise to the surface, as in this 1961 conversation with Enzo Peri:

Remarkably, this sense of communion squared for Fellini with an ability to integrate his formative obsessions—the circus imagery and atmosphere, and the wild, disreputable comic figures that captivated his boyhood—with the lingering dishevelment and mundane magic of postwar life.

Among his collaborations with Rossellini, the most recognizable precursor of Fellini’s own films is The Miracle (1948), a forty-minute short in which Fellini himself appears as a vagabond—tall, bearded, gloomily handsome—who allows Anna Magnani’s simpleminded goatherd to confuse him with her celebrity crush: Saint Joseph. After enhancing this confusion with wine from his flask, the vagabond impregnates the woman, giving her the miraculous child of the title. Fellini supplied the story, a potentially sardonic premise that Rossellini treats with sincere dramatic intensity. Magnani’s credulous character bears a family resemblance to the wayward bride infatuated with the eponymous, turbaned fumetti idol in The White Sheik (1952; Fellini’s first solo-directed feature) and to the wonder-struck waifs played by Giulietta Masina in La strada and Nights of Cabiria (1957). These disenfranchised women are vulnerable yet fierce, and their subjective reality eventually takes on a transcendent power despite the chaos they’ve been plunged into by duplicitous men.

A large part of the beguiling comedy and depth of these early films lies in the empathy Fellini grants all his lost and desperate characters, men and women, in equal measure, and the tensions that play out as we watch reality collide with their manifold desires, projections, and delusions. The men may be narcissistic, fast-talking exploiters, seducers, and swindlers, but the hustling, libidinous vaudeville-troupe commander in Variety Lights; the restless layabouts postponing adulthood in I vitelloni (1953); the merciless con men in Il bidone (1955); the oblivious, controlling husband in The White Sheik, to say nothing of the unhappily married sheik himself; and even La strada’s Zampanò, facing the encircling emptiness of his life with relentless brute force—Fellini gives all of them a moment, at the very least, of stunned awareness as they face the dead ends provided by their simple or intricate self-deceptions.

I’m hardly venturing a unique opinion when suggesting that, of all the masterpieces that Fellini made during the first span of his career, Nights of Cabiria is the most hilarious and heartbreaking. A seminal scene—practically a template for his future films—features a movie star who picks up the pint-size streetwalker Cabiria after the man’s glamorous girlfriend slaps his face and calls him a second-rate ham. The actor playing the actor is none other than Italian cinema’s equivalent of Errol Flynn, Amedeo Nazzari, presenting a version of himself called Alberto Lazzari, a creature of such white-jacketed, square-jawed confidence and desirability that reality bends around him (just as, with more overt cartoon flourishes, reality warped around the White Sheik).

Nazzari’s Lazzari prompts a spectacular display of quicksilver emotional responses from Masina’s Cabiria—disbelief and suspicion, glitter-eyed giddiness, defiant pride—as the actor’s unlikely invitation transports them from his careening convertible to an exclusive nightclub to the bedroom in his sleek villa, where Cabiria touches his shoulder to make sure he’s real, then kisses his hand. Before any further kissing ensues, Lazzari’s weepy girlfriend shows up, requiring the overextended movie star to stash the prostitute in the bathroom. Slipping away at dawn, Cabiria smacks her head on a glass door—pure slapstick, and a definitive reminder of unyielding class barriers.

The film’s second half leads into more wrenching, life-threatening circumstances, with a dream of love transformed, as if by the switch of a lens, into a cruel nightmare. The melodrama is played out with remarkable restraint and suspense—Fellini clears the film of music, giving space for Nino Rota’s resurgent theme to emanate from teenage street musicians in the last scene, building to Masina’s famous final close-up: Cabiria smiling through tears, her eyes flashing into the camera. It works so effectively, so devastatingly, because Fellini succeeds in making us believe what Cabiria believes: we all deserve a happy ending.

The critical and commercial success of Nights of Cabiria—it was awarded an Oscar for best foreign-language film, like La strada before it—was a prelude to the sensational international impact achieved by La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963), panoramic movies made with bigger budgets and wider frames, whereby Fellini kept hold of early influences and motifs while radically ramping up his game. The social landscape in these stories has flipped; Fellini no longer focuses on impoverished characters, though his new protagonists—Marcello Mastroianni plays both: Marcello, a tabloid journalist, in La dolce vita; Guido, a film director, in 8½—are just as isolated and unhinged, hectically adrift.

In a reversal of the Nazzari interlude in Cabiria, a rich heiress brings Marcello to a streetwalker’s flooded suburban apartment and they stay the night, but most of the scenes in the films unfold in places of shimmering wealth, and the main arena for 8½ is a carnivalesque health spa. (For both films, a great many sets were constructed at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios and resourcefully intercut with real locations.) The Mastroianni characters are more definably alter egos for their creator: bemused watchers and ringleaders, at once gallant and clueless, privileged men holding back existential despair while scraping the bottom of burned-out romantic impulses. They are narcissists on the verge of falling out of love with themselves. As in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), which Mastroianni made between Fellini’s two epics, it is hard to imagine anyone other than the actor inhabiting such passive, untrustworthy antiheroes. Who else could shade their actions and regrets with such endearing intelligence, charm, and shame?

Sex was never absent from Fellini’s movies, but in these pictures it becomes more overtly, and seductively, an active ingredient in his protagonists’ confusion. Pleasures of the flesh are traded as a false currency, corresponding to a larger societal failing, an absence of purpose and feeling: decadence riding the wave of postwar prosperity. The loose plots contain episodes of bitterness and even stark mayhem, but the overarching problem, both films suggest, is a lack of selflessness, the betrayal of love, in the face of this gathering, glittering, celebrity-obsessed commercial wave.

At this point, and moving forward, Fellini was reporting from within the amped-up glare of his own fame, circling personal obsessions while increasingly drawn to archetypes and historical figures set in a past that’s like an unknown planet. With his name now riding shotgun beside the movies’ titles—Fellini Satyricon (1969); Roma (1972), often billed as Fellini’s Roma; Fellini’s Casanova (1976)—he doubled down on an approach, a conviction, that involved a layering and dilation of the dreamlike nature of his stories, which were now almost all decentered, death-haunted collages made up of rough-edged narrative fragments. These films are adventurous, full of surprises, often magical, and each is distinctive, a bold departure from the last, though they all tend to revel in artifice and to rush away from tame, time-bound experience. Among the later and last movies, my preference tilts toward two multi­faceted self-portraits—Roma and Intervista (1987)—films in which Fellini appears comfortably and even humbly as a version of himself, doubled or tripled: an older man looking at a young man not far removed from “the little boy from Rimini who lives inside me.”

Stepping off the train from the North, the eighteen-year-old Fellini arrives in Roma fourteen minutes into the movie, an idealized, lanky, glossy-haired kid, Travolta-esque in a white suit. He finds his way to an apartment building crowded with eccentric roommates, presided over by an enormous, bedridden matriarch. There follows a joyously wanton street scene wherein the young man joins roughly a hundred lusty Romans sitting elbow to elbow at outdoor tables, chowing down on bowls of pasta as other dishes are brought forth: calf intestine, snails with mint, some kind of melted animal head decorated with a detached eyeball. It’s the start of World War II; everyone’s talking at once, but the closest they get to expressing a political opinion is “The more you eat, the more you shit.” None of these palavering diners appear beyond this scene, which abruptly cuts to shots of the street at night, tables cleared and empty as lean dogs slink through the trash, lit by the jumping blue light of an arc welder.

Impermanence, the ephemeral nature of life, is one clear theme darting within a movie that refuses to answer a single narrative expectation. (Young Fellini, our nominal hero, is bewitched by a woman in a high-end brothel; he invites her to meet him “outside”—and we never see either of them again.) Roma is an Italian cousin to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the great unclassifiable Russian city portrait that’s also a paean to the power of filmmaking, capturing life in motion, defying time, editorially adjusting its flow. As in Vertov’s epic, Roma’s camera is featured as a virtual character, an omnipotent eye, though Fellini’s film is more openly fictional, mixing documentary elements with extravagant mirages—an utterly personal, unpredictable visual poem.

In a jaw-dropping sequence on the superhighway that “circles the city like one of Saturn’s rings,” we’re shown the camera mounted on a crane, sheathed in wind-flapping protective plastic under a darkening sky, while the actual Fellini—fifty-one years old, prim and calm in a suit, vest, and tie—follows in a crew-driven car. We’ve seen plenty of big-budget movies commandeering freeways, and they routinely involve paralyzing traffic jams or high-speed chases in service of familiar plots, but Fellini’s freeway is a feral spectacle unto itself, an overview of civilization, an outlandish, unfolding event. Black smoke seethes up from the pavement and rain floods the lanes as we glimpse into surrounding vehicles and motorcycle cops race ahead to attend to an apocalyptic crash—dead cows scattered around an overturned truck. Up ahead, more police stand in a phalanx against sign-wielding protesters: “Kick the ruling class out on its ass!”