SOURCE: Pickowicz, Paul G. Review of The Last Emperor, by Bernardo Bertolucci. American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (October 1989): 1035–36.

In the following review, Pickowicz argues that Bertolucci ignores important issues of Chinese history in The Last Emperor.

Bernardo Bertolucci spent 25 million dollars making The Last Emperor and won nine Oscars for his effort, but historians of China, with few exceptions, refuse to take this lavish production very seriously. Among other things, they object to the invention of some episodes, such as Pu Yi's attempted suicide in 1950, and the inexplicable omission of genuinely important moments in his life, such as his five-year imprisonment in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

But a more serious difficulty is that the story is based primarily on the notoriously unreliable “official autobiography” published by the Chinese government in 1963 after Pu Yi had undergone nine years of “reform through labor” in a Chinese prison for...