The medium of film represents a very powerful and fluid entity. Both a subject of influence and as well as a means of it. In this essay I am going to explore the film, The Last emperor, by Bernardo Bertolucci in the viewpoints of both inflection and reflection. What shapes and serves as influences for a film and what it, in turn, in its ability to reach out to the masses, influence the greater sphere of not just the viewers within the confines of the cinema, but society at large. The study of the so-called “transnationalism” of Chinese film into the mainstream of global audience is a great case study for the fundamental workings of the world, in both its inflection and reflection of the world we live in as well as of the contenders involved in the filmic process.
Prison inmates watching a communist propaganda depiction of history of the Sino-Japanese war.
By using this film as a gateway into the inner workings of this complex trans-national relationship between China and Hollywood, I am going to explore issues that are not unique solely to this film, but found in the wider vocabulary of trans-national Chinese Hollywood cinema sphere and its implication on the wider context of society. I am therefore breaking down the film into four themes namely:
– The colonist mode of cinematic visuality
– The Fu Manchu construct
– The Gaze
– Amorphous Representation
In my analysis I will not be analysing the film in isolation, but by showing its reflection on the bigger Chinese filmic temperament in Hollywood in bringing in examples to not only concretize the issues found in The Last Emperor, but also to bring forth my notion of Reflection and Inflection
Presenting to you Bernardo Bertolluci’s The Last Emperor (1987)
The coronation scene involving thousands of actors and extras in the Forbidden City of China.
The last Emperor is a trans-national production involving both Hollywood and Chinese production companies and distributed my mainstream Hollywood distributor, Colombia pictures. The film chronicles the life of Puyi, the last ruling emperor of China from a child emperor to an adult, progressing through the various transformative periods of China, from the imperial monarchy of Ancient China, the Republican era, the Sino-Japanese War and the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution. The narrative of the film closely follows Puyi in his perpetual conquest for power at the same time immersing the audience in the dynamism of shifting cultural and historical landscape of China. The film was no doubt a Hollywood success with box office hits and had clinched 9 Oscars at the 1988 academy awards.
There were many elements in the film that struck me as being extremely peculiar. I recently wrote a personal review on this film. I will not be covering the issues I have with this film on a personal basis. However the unease that this film imbued in me unveil my journey in my exploration of the inner working of the Hollywood construct of Chinese films. The more I delved into this films, the more trends I start to identity and the picture starts to add up.
The Colonist Mode of Cinematic Visuality.
“Who is this George Washington?”
In The Last Emperor, young Puyi is introduced to a tutor, Reginald Johnston. In Puyi’s isolated world within the walls of the Forbidden City, Johnston seems to be his only trusted source of reliable information and very soon becomes his confidante. The start of this formidable friendship is represented by Pu Yi entrusting him on his secret mice that resides in his sleeve. Through the film, we see Johnston being the voice of reason and rationality and the advocator of the ideas of freedom and modernity. This can be seen in the scene when Johnston gives the bicycle (modernity) to Puyi, who attempts to use it to exit the gate of the Forbidden City (freedom) and Puyi insisting that he should get spectacles on the recommendation of Johnston and the doctor (rationality). Jenny Georges aptly describes The Last Emperor as “relying on old tropes about China and the Chinese. The man of honor, knowledge and authority tries to open the emperor’s eyes to the truth”.
“please do not tell anyone about my mouse”
“Everything west is good. especially Wrigley’s chewing gum, Bayer aspirin, and cars”. This statement represents the character’s love for all things west, but it also enunciates the point on western superiority that all it takes is the introduction of an English tutor that causes the emperor of china to subscribe to western ideals.
“I like all things western…”
Puyi singing “Am I Blue” after his eviction from the forbidden city.
Despite Bertolucci’s approach of showing the power imbalance between the West and the East being more nuanced compared to other movies, this theme of the white man, arriving at an exotic and distant land and performing his “prescribed’ roles of a savior is a common narrative in many Hollywood films. Jing Yang describes it as the prescribed notion of the “West’s Orientalist discourse about China”, “establishes the cultural, hierarchical and gendered relationship of the East- West encounter”. This practice of representing the white man as the savior and Chinese (often female) as the damsel in distress has been a common notion since Chinese and Asians started to be represented in the films of the West. Daniel Bernardi’s states that the likes of such films underscores the issues of power, control representation and American imperialism.
Prisoners singing propaganda songs.
The presentation of the Anglo American superiority is not only embodied in the introduction of the character Johnston as the high tutor, but also in a political and ideological sense, can be seen through the negative portrayal of the imperial regime as being “oppressive and cruel while forcing the people to submit to a rigid ideology” (George). The film transitions to the Maoist communist China but even without the direct reference to its ineptness, the film’s cleverly portrays the underwhelming state of progress that happens despite the constantly changing political landscape of the county. At the end we still see an oppressed and backward state, very much like the initial portrayal of imperial China. One thing to note however is the use of colour to show the irony of China’s “progress”. Imperial China was presented as a visual spectacle. The hyper reality of the saturated colours and the “dazzling arrays of phantasmagoric golds and yellows” (Rey Chow) contrasting with the “drab blues and greys” of the communist world. The “flourishing’ of the communist party is being presented in a cyclical notion that the Chinese political state is reverted back to its original suppression of freedom and power. Johnston serves as the audience’s reference for the benchmark of human righteousness, the moral being that uphold the western ideas and elicit a negative gaze on the imperial characters and on a bigger scale as a political standpoint. Chairman Mao has taken on the helm of Fu Machu on the Hollywood tradition as the antagonist of the Yellow Peril.
Colours of imperial China
The lack of, in communist China
Dr. Fu Manchu was the birth child of “the British popular literary imagination” (Kenneth Chan) in 1883, Birmingham England. During the period of 1920 to 1960s this nefarious creation of oriental discourse of British colonialism combined with the sentiments of the yellow peril, started to populate the silver screens of mainstream Hollywood. The Fu Machu character is essentially the amplification of the Euromerican fear and desire of the ancient other (Gina Marchetti) stemming from the “colonist and imperial discourse” (Kenneth Chan) The Fu Manchu characters were diabolical Asians “with great subtlety and infinite patience”.
There may be no apparent Fu Manchu characters in this film, but by bringing up the origins of a character such as Fu Manchu, we see the ideological rational behind such a filmic construct which emphasises the westerner’s portrayal of the otherness as a lowly entity. The scene in which the eunuch is forced to drink the ink, or when the Lord Chamberlain explains the senseless dictation of prohibiting the emperor from wearing spectacles, to the selfish intention of keeping the emperor within the bounds of the forbidden city are all Fu-Machu-esque examples of Chinese (in)sensibilities.
The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929)
The idea of the White Savior is nothing new, the macho projection of the cathartic desire of the society at large (male majority) is reflected in the films produced in Hollywood. Films like the world of Susie Wong (1960) and more recently films such as The Flowers of War (2011) and The Great Wall (2016), both directed by fifth generation auteur Zhang Yimou which features the incongruous insertion of a white protagonist (Christian bale and Matt Damon respectively) in a Chinese narrative world. The discourse in such ethnic castings are being criticized as the “vulgar profanity of injecting eroticism into a national tragedy” (Jing Yang) and Taiwanese American Actress Constance Wu criticized The Great Wall in her statement “We don’t need salvation. We like our color and our culture and our own strengths and our own stories.”
Christian Bale in The Flowers of War (2011)
Matt Damon in the upcoming Zhang Yimou spectacle, The Great Wall (2016)
Therefore, Bertolucci and the bubble of his white male dominated world is inflected in the political and charactorial depictions of this film. With Johnston as the White Knight in the film, contrasting with the barbaric, irrational and ridged nature of the imperial (and subsequently the communist) construct in China. This is an unfortunate reflection of the deep rooted perception of the Chinese people in the western subconscious. The Fu Manchu depiction of Chinese characters in Hollywood films.
The Gaze.
The high consorts spying at the emperor from a distance
In the early 1900, the competition between Asians and unskilled American laborers caused negative attitude and stereotypes in the US. Public pressure gave rise to the passing of certain laws that force the Asian minorities in the US to less rewarding jobs and subsequently physically constraining them into the Chinatowns. Very Quickly the chinatowns became tourist attracts “the Caucasians visited the Chinatown sections in san Francisco to see the strange and exotic sights.” Which introduces my point about the gaze or what I would like to also refer to as “cinematic tourism”. The voyeuristic pleasures of looking into the peep hole of a stranger’s life and the intrigue and curiosity it brings forth. This is evident in a statement made by Bertolucci himself as he recalls his experience of going to China:
“I went to China because I was looking for fresh air… For me it was love at first sight. I loved it. I thought the Chinese were fascinating. They have an innocence. They have a mixture of a people before consumerism, before something that happened in the West. Yet in the meantime they are incredibly sophisticated, elegant and subtle, because they are 4,000 years old. For me the mixture was irresistible”
Chinatown, Early 1900s
Rey Chow further goes on to describe that Bertolucci’s statement is a “paradoxical conceptual structure that is ethnocentric” the paradox being his admiration for the “other” (orient) is actually “rooted in un-self-reflexive, cultural coded perspectives.” This analogy of the “cinematic tourism” bring forth the idea that the gazer is one constructing the image where the enjoyment of the “tourist” (viewer) derives itself from a projection of personal desires. “The cinema audience becomes vicarious tourists from whom “Chine” is served on screen” (Rey Chow). Janice Mouton states that the image of the Orient has been fashioned by the west’s “creative imagination” according to a “logic” governed by “a battery of desires, repression, investments and projections.”
Kenneth Chan described the gaze as the “issue of power relations”, the notion that the filmmaker has the power over the audience in where to point the lens and therefore control over the images being shown. The study of this cinematic language is, according to Kenneth an important critique of the orient discourse as it points the lens back to the filmmakers. A counterintuitive inflective study on the people behind the camera as opposed to those in front. I am going to split this category into 2 sub points namely the Portrayal of female Sexuality and Spectacle Exoticism of the Orient.
Portrayal of female Sexuality.
In Jeffery Scone’s definition of exploitation in Hollywood cinema, he states that exploitation “is how paradoxically, part of the dominant taste , and its processes and discourse have become integral to cinema’s official and mainstream manifestation”. With the silver screen being the blank canvas for Western imagination and desires, the orient female sexuality is often put into the spotlight in Chinese Hollywood films. Anna May Wong, often touted as the first Chinese American movie star recounts how she has to cue her body in accordance with a potentially attractive exotic image such as swaying body hinting an illicit sexuality or a kneeling body conveying voluntary enslavement in order to strategies her minority position in Hollywood. (Mary Ann, Yingjin) A very telling account on the culture of exploitative fantasy of the female spectacle present in Hollywood.
Anna May Wong
Rey Chow describes the last emperor as a feminized space of “eroticism” where the women characters are “pushed to an astructual outside”. The High consorts, empress, second consort and the wet nurse “appear as objects of pleasure” that is being “strung together through a narrative that remembers them as gratifying female breasts, partners in sex games, perverse lesbians, and opium smokers.” The wet nurse for instance is depicted as an eroticized love for the young Puyi, and is depicted as a submissive subject of male sexual desire. The portrayal of the High consort in the scene following the doctor’s diagnosis that Puyi requires spectacles, it is revealed that the high consorts were present in the rooms as they expresses their disapproval in an almost comical fashion. Their stoic disposition and the peculiarity of their portrayal serves to demonstrate notion of the female spectacle. The visual imagery of the Empress temporal indulgence in lesbianism seems like a sudden discourse in the narrative of the story having no direct reference in the narrative or plot specific setup-payoff mechanism. The discourse proves that the scene is merely a thing of visual spectacle, meant to tantalize the western gaze and their fantasy of the foreign (Oriental) beauty.
The young Puyi suckling his wet nurse.
Wan Jung and Eastern Jewel indulge in their sexual desires.
“An emperor does not wear spectacles”
Spectacle Exoticism of the Orient.
This film is undoubtedly a visual spectacle, very much exploiting in the “otherness” of the Chinese exotic and orient imagery. The context of China provides the filmmaker with an opportunity to present a visual narrative in the style of “erotic over-investment” (Silverman). The exotic architecture, the exuberant clothing worn by the people in the imperial palace and the late Manchu court, the peculiar dispositions of characters, thousands of Eunuch and servants at the disposal of the emperor, the dances, ceremonies, ritual and practices. This film does not seem to exercise restraint in its visual and exoticcharacter depiction by making the picture one of attaining maximum visual impact and awe for the western audience; “feeding the cravings of the eyes” (Ray Chow) This lack of restraint on the part of the filmmaker is a deliberate and telling evidence that the erotic and the exotic are the main aspects to this film’s construct. The idea of cinematic tourism comes into play when looking at the film from this perspective where we see the film not as simple a vehicle for a narrative but also a vehicle for gaze of the western audience.
Wedding festivities of Chinese opera and traditional music.
Pu Yi’s coronation is probably the scene that is packed with the most spectacle visual splendor. We see young Pu Yi emerging from the interior compound of the dragon throne, through a yellow fabric into the main square of the Forbidden City. The camera movement reveals the huge spectacle for thousands of “aristocrats, landlords, mandarin and eunuchs” dressed in exorbitant costume lined up with geometric precision beyond the frame of the film. When the Pu Yi emerges they all kowtow to him. The unsettling peculiarity of the scene, with a 3-year-old emperor being paid respect by thousands of people of the imperial land, while he frolics around in his oversized costume seems somewhat of a mockery and an “ethnocentric attitude of the superficial East”. The senselessness of the situation it presents contrasted with the sheer absurdity of the reality the film presents brings forth the statement made by Orville Schell:
Young Puyi emerges from the palace to be greeted by thousands of his subjects.
“The West has traditionally thought of itself as the site of substance and the Orient as one of surface; the fetishism of the film for dazzling silks, brocades, and embroidery still promotes an attitude that, after all, underneath the Orient’s silky sleeves there is nothing there.”
The scene of the whole turtle in the soup given to empress Dowager before her death brought forth to her by a Eunuch who proclaims “longevity!” in a quasi-Chinese accent, the grotesquely made up Dowager Empress (Bertolucci’s tribute to Nicholas Ray), the scene of Eunuch sniffing the young emperor’s excrements to determine the appropriate adjustments to his nutritional intake. These are also moments in the film that seem to push the idea of the exotic as something to be gazed upon with the look of a cinematic tourist’s fascination of the distant land of imperial china. A land of romantic mystery and perpetual intrigue that fills the frame. This fascination is presented with the duality of the orient’s inferiority in terms of its political and moral substance as presented in the first category of my analysis.
Turtle soup for longevity.
“I am empress Dowager and I have lived here for a long long time…”
“More beancurd today”
Exoticism is however not possible without the malleability of the representation of culture without the constructed realm of the film, which brings me to my next category:
Amorphous Representation.
History is written by the “beholder of the lens”
The story of PuYi was based in the “official autobiography” of his life, published by the Chinese government in 1963. The book was written during the time of communism and therefore the stories are being told through the lens of communism (Paul G). Furthermore, the film has been accused of inventing certain events such as Pu Yi’s attempted suicide as well as the omission of “genuinely important moments” of his life such as his imprisonment in the Soviet Union. Therefore, showing that the film was presented through the lens of Bertolucci as well. However despite the factual diffraction through historical and filmic lenses, Bertolucci states “I am a storyteller, I am not a historian… To history I prefer mythology. Because history starts with the truth and goes toward lies. While mythology starts from lies and fantasy and goes toward truth.”. The last emperor is an example of the how a film has to negotiate different points of view and exploits the incredulous malleability of the film medium especially in the representation of historical events to bring forth the mythological version of a historical narrative.
The story of Pu Yi and his life as a passive puppet figure, manipulated and controlled by various powers above him can be seen as analogous to the nature of the historical and factual representation of the characters in the film. The passive nature of Pu Yi’s political existence pandering to the need of the entities above him (members of the imperial construct, the Japanese Army, the prison governor, the communist government) is therefore analogous to the nature in which the film panders to the western construct and desires of the orient. His representation of the Japanese “amounts to little more than a recasting of the crude, one-dimensional caricatures of Japan that have appear time and again in Chinese films since 1937” (Paul G) and therefore showing that the films follows the Hollywood formula by treating Asia as “mysterious and unfathomable”.
Puyi speaks to an empty audience. Realises his fate as a puppet.
Paul G also argues that despite the film clinching nine awards at the Academy, none of the actors were nominated for best actor. The notion of the actor themselves being succumbed to being puppets of the makers (award winner) of the film proves an apt connection to the Puyi’s roles as puppets to those above him throughout his life. This also shows the superior disposition the filmmakers have not only as the beholder of lenses, but also in the reception of their films, while the “same kind of recognition not granted to its players”.
Despite the film being set in the historical shifts of China from imperial China to communist China, the historical context seems to “serve as a backdrop” (Paul G) and treated as a stage for the exotic to occur. Paul further argues that non-specialist viewers would most likely not gain any meaningful information with regards to the history in which the movie transcends through. “the Last Emperor has virtually nothing significant to say about the major issues in modern Chinese History”. Yet Bertolucci is able to achieve a heightened sense of realism by having a sequence that uses real footage of the Sino-Japanese war in China. The raw images of devastation anchored in reality starkly contrasts with the polished and over-embellished visual language of Puyi’s world. The illusion of realism in the context of fantasy with the intent of creating Betolucci’s “mythology”.
Horrors of war depicted in real footage.
The film is about an emperor searching for a self and this film is also in a continual process of finding its identity as a Chinese film in the Hollywood sphere of production and distribution. The idea of historical and filmic mythmaking is symbolically represented in the scene where Japanese officer, Amakasu directs the cameraman who documents the events at the coronation ball. In the same manner, history is written by the beholder of the lens. This moment of self-reflection on Bertolucci’s part shows his sense of self-consciousness in his role as a filmmaker. Which further demonstrates his intention of not simply representing the facts and figures of Chinese history. He is essentially making a Chinese film for a Hollywood audience. Paul G summarizes this point by stating “The repeated emphases on the “in- ternational” nature of the film’s production can hardly disguise the fact that what appear on the screen are mostly what would be identified as “Chinese” faces enacting a “Chinese” story/history.”
Bertolucci embodied as Amakasu directing his own piece of history.
Conclusion
In the final scene of the film, we see tourists flooding the Forbidden City into the hall of supreme harmony, the Dragon Throne cordoned off. To me this scene symbolizes the entirety of my essay. The Dragon Throne / palace ground representing the foreign and exotic (Chinese) and the tourists representing the Hollywood gaze. The barrier representing the inhibition of complete assimilation of the East and West filmic culture and representation.
In conclusion, Bernardo Bertolluci’s film The Last Emperor presents us with an interesting case study that opens up a conversation about the its inflection as a film that is conscious of its orientalist portrayal of Chineseness as well as a reflection of the psyche of the filmmakers in the Hollywood portrayal of Chineseness on the silver screen.
Puyi sneaks back to his throne.
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