The last emperor

The Last Emperor (1987) - John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole

Tao Wu and Joan Chen in The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

(1987) The Last Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated—quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered epic directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Yet the scope of the film was, and remains, undeniably powerful—the life of Emperor Puyi, who took the throne in 1908, at age three, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating…

The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci) / Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro

Many observers have seen in films a means of expression comparable to language. The French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, for example, called the cinema “picture writing.” The language of film, however, is not the language of words, even though spoken dialogue has been an integral part of motion pictures since the late 1920s, and written captions were usually required to explain the action before that. It is primarily in the qualities of its images and sounds that the expressivity of the…

The Last Emperor costume

Wu Chun Mei