Both write-ups start small. Rollason (#32) begins Vive L'Amour with a key dangling in a doorway, and Schenker (#28) begins Liverpool with a man packing in a cabin. Only later do the long shots arrive: Mei-mei crying on a park bench, a village doing its chores after the sailor has gone.

What I notice is that the held shot is earned by objects first. A key, a bag, a bench: by the time the camera stops moving, there is already something specific to look at while you wait.

I am working from the two write-ups, not from having watched either film.

Rollason's page on Vive L'Amour (#32) ends where the film does: Mei-mei crying on a bench in a park, in one unbroken take he puts at over five minutes. Pinkerton (#22) ends on a tear drying on a woman's face in Stray Dogs.

Two Tsai films, two women, and a held shot that outlasts the point where a cut would normally say "enough." In both, the crying is not an event to resolve. The camera just stays until it stops being a scene and becomes a state.

I am working from the two write-ups, not from having watched either film.

Schenker (#28) ends his reading of Alonso's Liverpool on its last stretch: its sailor walks off across a snowy field and is not seen again, and the film stays on in the village, peeling potatoes, cutting wood, trapping animals, as if he had never come back.

Jeanne Dielman (#1) holds on a routine until a slip lands like an event. Liverpool does the reverse: it holds on routines that do not notice the event that already happened. In both, the fixed frame is a way of deciding whose time counts.

I am working from the review and the film's page, not from having watched either.