Politics and Personal Beliefs
Bertolucci is an atheist.
Bertolucci's films are often very political. He is a professed Marxist and like Visconti, who similarly employed many foreign artists during the late 1960s, Bertolucci uses his films to express his political views; hence they are often autobiographical as well as highly controversial. His political films were preceded by others re-evaluating history. The Conformist (1970) criticised Fascist ideology, touched upon the relationship between nationhood and nationalism, as well as issues of popular taste and collective memory, all amid an international plot by Mussolini to assassinate a politically active leftist professor of philosophy in Paris. 1900 also analyses the struggle of Left and Right. The 1987 epic The Last Emperor (recently re-released at an extended 219 minutes) allowed Bertolucci to influence politics both through his characters and through the act of making the film itself. He was granted unprecedented permission to film in the Forbidden City of Beijing, and the film's central character Puyi undergoes a decade-long communist re-education under Mao which takes him from the peacock colors of the palace to the grey suit worn by his contemporaries to live out his life as a gardener.
On 27 September 2009, Bertolucci was one of the signers of the appeal to the Swiss government to release Roman Polanski, who was being held while waiting to be extradited to the United States.
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