Last Emperor, Lost Emperor

I recently took 130 eleventh-and twelfth-grade students to see Bernardo Bertolucci’s Italian/Chinese epic, The Last Emperor. I got the idea from my mother-in-law who told me after she saw the film, “You know, I learned a lot from that film. I guess we didn’t study much about China and Japan when we were in school.”

We still don’t study much about China or Japan in school; in fact, we don’t study much about Africa or South America, either. But movies can help fill that knowledge void, especially serious movies that don’t suffer from excessively revisionist screenwriting. And Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is such a movie.

In the opening scenes, three-year-old Pu Yi is taken from his parents and whisked off to the Forbidden City. There he is crowned Emperor of Ten Thousand Years, the rulerof half the world’s people. But his reign is short-lived. First the leaders of the infant Chinese republic, then war lords, Nationalists, Japanese, and finally the Chinese Communists rule China.

What Is China Really Like?

To call this movie an ambitious project is like calling the Hindenburg a real big balloon. The multi-million dollar epic was filmed in English by an Italian crew in China. Thousands of Chinese extras, dressed in authentic costumes, were assembled in the Forbidden City, the centuries-old palace of Chinese emperors. The visual spectacle alone makes it one of the most compelling films of the year.

But what makes The Last Emperor so spellbinding is the glimpse it gives us into China, a country that has historically been closed to outsiders. The decadence of the Quing dynasty, the corruption of the palace eunuchs and courtiers, and the chaos of the warlord years come together in a comprehensible time line that runs through the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory, and the cultural revolution, and ends with the reopening of China to the West. Indeed, few movies capture the sweep of history as fully as does The Last Emperor.

But one caveat is in order. All films reflect a political and spiritual perspective, and that perspective bends the reality of events to fit the world view of the filmmaker. Bertolucci has praised the Chinese government—which cooperated fully in the production—for giving script approval while correcting only a few historical inaccuracies. They closed the Forbidden City to tourists while the film crew shot key scenes. Soldiers from the Red Army shaved their heads and wore Manchu queues, and teenagers portrayed the sloganeering Red Guards of the cultural revolution. Such artistic collaboration with a Western director is unprecedented in modern Chinese history.

The impression is that the Chinese have abandoned censorship in favor of artistic freedom. The Last Emperor is certainly a more candid and artistically daring film than the Mao-inspired, revolutionary-peasant-maiden-meets-revolutionary-worker-boy genre that has dominated Chinese cinema. But it provides in its denouement a very positive view of the “re-education” of Pu Yi and an implication that the Communist revolution treated its prisoners with “revolutionary humanitarianism.” There is no torture and no execution, and a stint in Fu Chen prison comes out looking rather more pleasant than my experience in navy boot camp.

We know from history that Pu Yi, who collaborated with the Japanese as puppet emperor of Manchuria, was captured by the Soviet army at the end of the war and transferred to a Siberian prison. Hearing of the Communist victory in 1949, he begged Stalin in a letter not to release him to the Chinese who, he feared, would torture and kill him.

The Remaking Of A Monarch

However, the ex-emperor was returned to Beijing where he spent the next ten years of his life being re-educated in a prison for war criminals. His imperial past, reasoned Mao Zedong, made it imperative that he be remolded into a new socialist man, to serve as a living example of the moral legitimacy of the People’s Republic. Accordingly, he was not beaten, and for a time he was given special treatment, including the services of his valet.

For the present Beijing regime, which owns Chinese distribution rights. The Last Emperor provides a politically or thodox foray into the world of international cinema. In the end. Pu Yi is shown as a new man, whose innate goodness has been salvaged from his traitorous imperial past by a benevolent and patriotic socialism. This is not mere propaganda; far from it. But The Last Emperor does reflect the world views of those who produced it, including a strong and subtle performance by Ying Ruocheng, China’s Deputy Minister of Culture, who plays the prison director responsible for re-educating Pu Yi.

The Last Emperor is a great Him in almost every respect. But a wise viewer will examine its implicit messages in the light of a broader understanding of Communist “re-education.”

By Stefan Ulstein, chairman of the English department, Bellevue (Wash.) Christian School.

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