ABSTRACT
Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor won the 1988 Best Picture Oscar and four Golden Globe awards. Not only does it seem a humanizing and sensitizing film, it synopsizes twentieth-century Chinese history from 1900 to the 1960s Cultural Revolution. Since the People’s Republic of China granted Bertolucci the unprecedented privilege of filming the emperor’s life on location inside the Forbidden City, the film projects an unusually great aura of authenticity.
