By this time we have learned that these pretty land and cityscapes mark the ends of scenes and contain undecidable ellipses in time. A man emerges from one of the rickshaws and enters a building, while villagers mill around an open area gossiping. Hou masterfully builds up our expectations for a poetic transition shot introduced by a typically undecidable ellipsis , only to reveal that there was no temporal gap between the shots, that there was neither transition nor ellipsis. In this respect, Marsha Kinder's recent elaboration of the iterative in cinema is useful to understand how this approach to violence relates to the film's politics. The iterative refers to stating once that which happened multiple times.
All films contain both iterative and singulative aspects.
The classical style tends to emphasize its singulative characters, while relegating iterative aspects to mere background. The troubles of De Sica's singulative bicycle thief, for example, are meant to evoke the common experience of the entire nation's poor. In like manner, there is a constant, foregrounded slippage between the singulative family at the center of Hou's narrative and the collective experience of Taiwanese between the twin oppressions of the Japanese and the Nationalists. While a typical Hollywood film would focus on the family to the exclusion of larger political issues, City of Sadness centers on a single family to speak about every family, or the nation as family. After Hinoe watches the indiscriminate beatings in the distance, the sequence ends with Wen-ching becoming the focus of a mob's wrath.