As for the exaggeration, like Dickens he actually softens and takes the edge off the unexpectedness and weirdness of others, even as he remains alive to it. He is close to Dickens in pursuing a politics based on gentleness, on the thought that a good society will form when this person here acts justly and tenderly to that person there. The outsiders, the marginalised, the victims in life attract him, and he looks at them face to face, never from above, and never from a place removed from their troubling difficulty. Where some see sentiment, his lovers perceive a capacity to feel, not for some idealised abstraction, but for the specific character. As with Dickens, critics find him sentimental, exaggerated and chaotic. In his black and white movies, that almost unparalleled run of masterpieces from The White Sheik (1952) to 8½ (1963), Fellini stands as the Charles Dickens of cinema. While probably all these qualities pervade his films, it’s their curiosity and their openness to the world that enchant you, as he once put it, his “immense faith in things photographed”, the sense that film might allow a moment of communion between the viewer and things, between you and a human face. They include curiosity, humility before life, the desire to see everything, laziness, ignorance, indiscipline and independence. Fellini once laid out the basic requirements for being a film director.
