This paper attempts to flesh out suggestions about the use of the long take and long shot in East Asian Cinema. Such stylistic features attest the quick mobility of popular cultural influence in contemporary East Asia, and imitation among directors. The shooting style that Ozu Yasujiro and Hou Hsiao-Hsien have employed through their distanced and fixed camera positioning, and their preference for the long take, has resurfaced in the work of a few younger filmmakers in Asia. In particular, Hou has established the distant long shot and static long take as expressive and denotative devices in themselves, laying the basis of a regional style that David Bordwell has called an ＂Asian Minimalism.＂ Considered to be influenced by Ozu's and Hou's style, the films of Kore-eda Hirokazu are linked by stylistic concerns. Indeed, Kore-eda's films help in any reconsideration of the use of the long take/long shot in contemporary Asian cinema. The three Asian filmmakers' favoured use of the long take/long shot seems to be a product of shared cultural/historical experience and not exclusively attributable to authorship. Starting by questioning an aesthetic tendency that seems so prevalent in recent East Asian films, this paper probes cultural meanings conveyed by use of the long take and long shot beyond the assumption of western film theory, in hopes of explaining ＂Asian Minimalism＂ better and tracing its significance.
