Criterion has just released on DVD a new transfer of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Emperor, which won 9 Academy Awards, in time for the Beijing Olympics. It’s a 4-disc director approved special edition set, with all sorts of goodies, as only Criterion can dish up. Looks great. I’m getting it! The centerpiece is the all-new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. This new version is in the aspect ration of 2:1 (rather than at the 2.35:1 it was commonly projected at in the theater). Despite the fact that both cinematographer and director intended the movie to be watched in 2:1, Criterion has received lots of angry feedback from movie buffs, who seem to believe that the wider the screen, the better. Or “waste not, want not” when it comes to cropping. With that attitude, why not just watch hundreds of hours of unedited rushes? What we finally see in theaters (or on Criterion director-approved DVDs) is highly and surgically “doctored”, i.e., edited.
I wandered around these very same steps (pictured above, with the young PuYi on them) in the Forbidden city on Monday. I didn’t have as good sunlight as Bertolucci and a lot of the buildings are under renovations for the Olympics, but it’s a spectacular place, a palace of immense scale, meant to dwarf and awe mere humans (which you can walk through today, China being a republic, unlike a lot of other countries, e.g., Japan or the UK–where there’s still a monarch and the palace is verboten to the general public). Click on pics for full hi-res versions.
And here’s one of the Great Wall. Follow it for miles and miles in the high-res version…
