Portfolio Element1 Film and Album Review

I hope my review of this movie is relatively objective. So I will find some opinions that I agree with. This is a great movie that deserves to be deeply interpreted by people from different ages. None of his shots are wasted. He is worthy of recognition in both the West and the East, by means of, inseparablity from Puyi’s ‘popularity’ and ‘authority’.

‘Bertolucci’s movie was made with the blessing of the Chinese government, which gave him permission to film in the Forbidden City, so you would probably not expect a searing full-frontal critique of Chinese political history. However, The Last Emperor is by no means a propaganda job. It’s notably balanced on the many regimes it covers, and there’s a particularly effective scene in which a loyal communist teacher from Puyi’s labour camp is for no obvious reason declared an enemy of the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, the evident parallels between the formality and structure of the imperial court, and the formality and structure of Maoist China, make a subtle but striking point. The style of authoritarianism might change, but the substance does not.’

His life is a sad irony, his end is a bittersweet elegy. But it is precisely because so little "happens" in this epic that its vast and expensive production schedule is important. When we see those thousands of servants bowing to a little boy, for example, the image is effective precisely because the kowtowing means nothing to the boy, and the lives of the servants have been dedicated to no useful purpose.

Everything involving the life of Pu Yi was a waste. Everything except one thing: the notion that a single human life could have infinite value. In its own way, the Dragon Throne argued that, making an emperor into a god in order to ennoble his subjects. And in its own way, the Chinese revolution argued the same thing, by making him into a gardener.--Roger Ebert Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

The great director Bertolucci cleverly integrated this "déjà vu" with Puyi's memories, connecting the virtual and the real with the metaphorical "door" of the film. Even the viewer is brought into the intertwining of repeated memories and re-enactments. The three important separations in the film are all reflected by the opening, closing and shouting of "doors".


From the departure of the wet nurse to the suicide of the biological mother trying to break out of the Forbidden City, to the separation of the puppet Manchukuo and Wanrong. Every time the door opens, every time a few steps away becomes two lives in a second, every time the cage screams, the historical scenes are always strikingly similar.


The movie also puts the viewer in the intertwining of memories and reality. The last emperor is both the subject and the object of history. Every time he walked out of a "door", he quickly found the entrance to another "door". Many people say that his life is full of helplessness and control, but perhaps these shackles and imprisonments of his are also the safe haven that he unconsciously seeks and relies on, but he just doesn't know it.

We live in different lies, and at each different moment people live for "self-righteous truth". Bertolucci deliberately described Puyi's myopia in his youth in the film, and also clearly exposed the embarrassing background of the little emperor at that time. Most of the domestic slaves protected his "clear vision", and only a few people pointed out a clear path for him. Road, tell him what the world is like.

Marx said when talking about historical figures:
“They cannot express themselves, they can only be expressed”
Puyi's fate is a persona and symbol constructed by others. When he was young, he failed to become "himself" first and then gradually form an "identity". Instead, he was forced to fill the position that had already been set. On the road to being deceived and looking for freedom, Johnston taught him to innovate, break through himself, and change his lifestyle. The director of the War Criminals Management Center taught him to break free from himself and learn to observe the world with his own eyes. However, the director arranged a dramatic scene, allowing the Cultural Revolution to mercilessly criticize the "good" director, while the elderly Puyi was pushed aside, unable to fight against it.


At the end of the film, Puyi spent a dime to enter the Forbidden City and visit this former "home". He gave the grasshopper hidden under the dragon chair to the guard's child and disappeared into the hall. The camera switched, and there were countless tourists in the hall. The tour guide’s words fell:

"This is the Hall of Supreme Harmony.

This is where the emperor prepares the main hall.

The last person to ascend the throne here was Emperor Xuantong of the Qing Dynasty.

Aixinjueluo Puyi was only 3 years old at the time.

He died in Beijing in 1967. "

https://movie.douban.com/subject/1293172/

He is chasing his belongings all the time. But none of them were still there. He found the cricket in the end which was his childhood toy. He is released in the end. The sunshine is back. The narration and dialogues in the film is romantic and readable for people have no knowledges in Qing Dynasty. The colour is retro saturated, with a western atheistic, but its cool for using natural shots. Surprisingly, most of the figures are not flat, and none of the shots are wasting. The film does not spend a lot of time describing the war, but depicts Puyi’s desire for power in detail. The sound design is great in segmenting the environments in the forbidden city and in the new china and in Puyi’s inner world.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the influential electronic music composer and member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra who won an Oscar for the score for “The Last Emperor” and composed the haunting score for “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. He was 71. A statement from his management company said, “He lived with music until the very end. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to his fans and all those who have supported his activities, as well as the medical professionals in Japan and the U.S. who did everything in their power to cure him.”

Album <The Last Emperor>

The composition by Ryuichi Sakamoto brings the film helplessness, depression and tension with minor composition. The whole film is intertwined with grand orchestral music and variations on the theme melody with Chinese national characteristics, which aptly highlights the legendary experiences of Puyi’s life. The use of disharmonious chords along with E melody in most of the songs made it a very confused and struggled worried taste. In “First Coronation”, the use of koto Zheng playing a Japanese melody was obviously strange compared to the later E melodies carried by strings. In “Rain”, the fast paced speed tempo was like 131, combined with using a lot of Ostinato, short melodic phrase repeated throughout a composition, sometimes slightly varied or transposed to a different pitch, carried the feeling of happiness, excitement all the way into heavy raindrops.