The Last Emperor · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A small boy is handed a cricket in a wicker cage. Sixty years later the same box surfaces in the same throne room, and something inside it is still faintly alive. Nothing in The Last Emperor is stranger, or truer, than that. Bertolucci gives you an object that folds 1908 into 1967 and lets the two dates touch. Hold onto it — it's the key to the whole film.

Because this isn't built like a life. It's built like the memory of a life, narrated by a man who isn't sure the life was his. The film opens in 1950: Pu Yi a prisoner of war at Fushun, scrubbed and interrogated by a Communist Party functionary. From that grey present it dissolves backward to the three-year-old carried into the Forbidden City to be worshipped by half a billion people. Gabriella Cristiani — who won the Oscar for this — almost never cuts hard between the eras. She dissolves. The seam softens, the prison bleeds into the palace, and you lose the ability to say which time is the real one and which is the remembered one.

Deleuze had a name for an image in which present and past, the actual thing and its reflection, become impossible to prise apart: the crystal-image. Think of a mirror you can no longer distinguish from the face in it. A normal flashback is dated — this happened, before, and here it is. That would be a recollection-image, and the film flirts with one each time the interrogation prompts a memory of the investiture. But Cristiani's slow fades refuse the date stamp. Time stops being a line you walk and becomes an order you move through, sideways, where every present carries its whole past coiled inside it. That is what Deleuze called the sheets of past — coexisting layers of a life, none of them simply 'over.' The cricket isn't a flashback. It's two sheets of time made into one object.

Why does this lens matter, rather than just calling the film a handsome biopic? Because it explains the thing biopics can't: Pu Yi barely does anything. He is enthroned at three, abdicates as a child, is expelled, installed as a Japanese puppet, imprisoned, re-educated, and ends as a Beijing gardener — and at every stage power happens to him. Deleuze would say Pu Yi lives the crisis of the action-image. The old cinema ran on a circuit: a character sees a situation and acts to change it. Pu Yi sees everything and can change nothing. The Forbidden City's walls, Storaro's corridors receding to a vanishing point the emperor can never reach — these are closed sets, frames that dwarf him, architecture doing the ideological work of a cage. He can only look. He becomes what Deleuze names the seer (voyant): not an agent but a watcher and an endurer. John Lone plays exactly that — a physical reticence, a stillness proper to a man who was always watched, breaking only into bewilderment or sudden rage.

And look what moves instead of him. The dynasty falls, the republic rises, Japan invades, the revolution comes — six decades of Chinese history surge past a figure held almost motionless at the center. Deleuze called this inversion the movement of world: the dancer goes still and the world does the dancing. Pu Yi is the still point; history is the choreography.

Then there is the colour, which is not decoration but Storaro's argument. His 'Chromatics' assigns each epoch a temperature: the imperial childhood drowned in amber, gold, ochre — warmth, but also confinement and unreality; the Manchukuo puppet years lit with a cold incandescent falseness; the prison cooled to blue-grey. This is the affective colour-image — a colour that absorbs a scene and becomes its feeling, so that history reaches you as heat and chill before it reaches you as fact. Storaro had been building this grammar since The Conformist, where fascist blues fight Roman ochres, and perfected it on Apocalypse Now. Here it becomes a direct image of time itself.

Place the film in its line and the deepest debt is to Visconti — Senso, The Leopard — whose Technicolor epics stage the aristocrat as a whole epoch, capitulating to power as theatrical self-betrayal, the ball sequence overwhelming the man. Deleuze used Visconti as his model case for crystal-decomposition: a crystalline world that is an ordered, aristocratic totality rotting from within. The Forbidden City is precisely that — a sealed ceremonial perfection already dying as the child is crowned, eunuchs and ritual and gold leaf decaying around a boy who rules nothing. Bertolucci took Visconti's rotting crystal and his own nested-time experiments from The Spider's Stratagem and built the most fully realized crystal-image in the historical epic.

What did it do to filmmaking? It proved a world-historical canvas — six decades, the real Forbidden City, tens of thousands of extras — could be organized not by plot momentum but by memory's logic, by dissolve and colour and a passive protagonist. It made an epic out of a man to whom things were done, and made that feel intimate. Nine Oscars for nine nominations followed, but the achievement is quieter: Bertolucci let you watch a life the only way its owner ever could — from inside the crystal, looking out, holding a box with something still alive in it.