| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, boasting an appealing sense of slowness, slow cinema has emerged as a distinctive trend in film production and attracted considerable attention within film studies. Often taken to be a key figure within this trend, the Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang uses various tools and techniques to construct such slowness in his films but is most well-known for his frequent employment of long takes. And the aim of this essay is to provide a comprehensive study of the latter within the context of, on the one hand, the history of and the controversy about slow cinema in general, and on the other hand, the life and thoughts of Tsai himself as a person and as a filmmaker. I will also try to show how two seemingly contradictory effects of the long take, i.e., its ability to preserve reality on the one hand and to defamiliarize it on the other, come into an interesting interplay in two of Tsai’s representative works from different periods of his careers, and how such use of technique not only contribute to an aesthetic sense of slowness but also conveys Tsai’s own reflections on the social reality of his time. | eng |