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should be conceived as a film-maker making an epic movie, which, using culture as a
weapon, depicts the people's liberating march; Matthew, instead, is critical about culture
being constituted by a single book, noting dryly that the Red Guards all carry the same book
and sing the same song, and that everybody, in this 'epic film', is just an extra. This is a
discernible political/intellectual perspective in Bertolucci's work and it also emerges, I will
argue, in The Last Emperor. In another sequence of Tlie Dreamers there is an overt
accusation of elitism; Matthew tells Theo that if he really believed in the revolution he would
be out in the street, not secluded in the apartment, talking about Mao while drinking
expensive wines. Matthew finishes his attack by asserting that Theo conceives of the word
'together' as not meaning a million people, but 'two or three'. This concept of not being 'out
in the street' and connecting with people evokes a comment by Douglas Morrey, who links
the unsatisfactory destiny of the Dziga Vertov collective films - which were commissioned
by European television companies but then ultimately given broadcast slots during the night -
to Steve Cannon's observation that 'there is something a little perverse about this apparent
refusal to make films in France during what was a time [1968] of real revolutionary ferment
and political possibility' (Morrey 2005: 91). The content and tone of these dialogues elicits
the viewer's intellectual awareness of the extra-diegetic presence of the real-world author, an
awareness even perhaps experienced by viewers unfamiliar with Bertolucci's career; the
dialogue is endowed with a degree of historical awareness and clarity that is inconsistent with
the protagonists' young age, and also with the chaotic state of flux of the contemporary socio­
political situation.
Further correspondences with La Chinoise
Besides the repeated insertion of clips. The Dreamers evokes other elements of La Chinoise;
in particular the theme of youngsters debating politics (although in The Dreamers cinematic
issues largely replace political questions) while secluded in a bourgeois apartment belonging
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