The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci)

During the mid 1980s, Bernardo Bertolucci, an Italian film director of international repute and admittedly leftist leanings, sought - and won - permission from the Chinese Communist government to shoot a motion picture about Pu Yi inside China, indeed, inside the Forbidden City. With funding from Columbia Pictures, a major American studio, this was to be one of the first Western-Communist Chinese joint ventures in filmmaking: the Chinese government would invest in the production, supplying locations, personnel, living quarters and other support as needed - in return for a share in the motion picture's estimated profits and partial control over the movie's contents. In terms of business arrangements, there was nothing unusual in this joint venture; since the "re-opening" of mainland China by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, followed by official diplomatic recognition of the Communist government by the Carter administration in

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told Party officials would be his primary source - would most assuredly not make Communist China look bad. Or so the reasoning must have gone. In point of fact, it does not. Indeed, The Last Emperor as a motion picture hardly touches upon Communist China at all, save under two extremely specific circumstances. In the first circumstance, a continuing storyline throughout the film has Pu Yi undergoing re-education in a northern Chinese prison after his tenure as puppet Emperor of Manchukuo. This is primarily used as a structural device, a method of telling his life story, as Pu Yi is forced to recount his past and how it led to the crime of his active collaboration with the Japanese - and the even greater crime of betraying the Chinese people. Within this context, the film audience is able to see the humanity of the Chinese system: under any other rule, Pu Yi would have been executed or sentenced to life imprisonment; within the Communist system, the film illustrates, all humans are salvageable. "You just want to use me!" Pu Yi accuses the governor of the prison, Jin Yuan. "Is it so wrong to be useful?" he is asked in return. While re-education camps have been denounced for their stifling of legitimate dissent, within the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Pu Yi, Pu Yi's, Forbidden City, Cultural Revolution, China Emperor, Western-Communist Chinese, Gang Five, pu yi, Red Chinese, Jin Yuan, Deng Xiaoping, pu yi's, forbidden city, cultural revolution, chinese government, red china, pu yi's life, yi emperor, pu yi emperor, yi's life, life pu yi, red chinese, communist system, red chinese government, emperor pu yi,
Approximate Word count = 2480
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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