Directed by Bertolucci and written by three composers, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Su Cong, The Last Emperor tells the story of Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, from his accession to the throne in 1908 until the Cultural Revolution, a period of almost sixty years. The film features many Chinese folk songs and operas, such as “The East is Red”, “Lullaby” (a northeastern folk song) and the Peking Opera “An Tian Hui”. Here I will mainly analyse the film’s ‘Lullaby’（around 27‘）.
The lullaby is in the warm A-tone mode, but the music is more melancholic and intense because of the infiltration, alternation and transformation of the minor key colours such as feather and shang. The combination of this distinctive national tonal approach with the poignant images of life and death and the suppressed weeping of the voices makes for a powerful combination of sound and picture that is both sorrowful and joyful. Lullaby not only has a dominant and radiating structural effect on the music of the film’s many themes in terms of its core tones, modal techniques, spatial characteristics and narrative direction, but also metaphorically writes about Pu Yi’s life with the pain of parting from her father and baby. The film opens with a shadow-like empty shot from the perspective of a traveller, moving and moving through historical images of pavilions, eaves and pavilions, inked seals and brocades. In parallel with the above images, the core pitch patterns, spins and melodic lines in each phrase of the Main Title Theme can be found in the Lullaby, as well as the shifting trajectories revealed through the technical practice of pitch material splitting, modulation, modulation and synthesis. On the one hand, this theme music inherits the influence of the couplet structure and its tonal colours of the opera music panel, making the audiovisual combination full of elegant courtly rhythms; on the other hand, with the help of Western multi-layered compound rhythms, it breaks away from the traditional sense of metrical stability, periodicity and regularity, while highlighting the spatial layers of the royal garden in the image. The music is a unified rhythm that leads the audience into the legendary world of the protagonist’s swaying, enchanted life.
However, the music’s internal structure and external form, the multiple combinations of Western and Chinese instruments, the leading motifs and the design of the weaving patterns all reflect the dominance of Western composition. It can be said that the artistic pursuit of resemblance rather than resemblance and the aesthetic interaction between the composer and the director reflect the profound grasp of the traditional Chinese culture in the film, and also convey the aesthetic paradigm and creative interest of the integration of traditional Chinese musical elements in the Western perspective in the sound rhythm and the combination of sound and painting.