Continuity editing is the dominant editing system in narrative film, designed to make cuts invisible and preserve the illusion of continuous time and space.
Continuity editing is the set of conventions developed by American filmmakers between roughly 1908 and 1917 — the Griffith era — to organise multiple shots into a coherent narrative space. Its rules include the 180-degree rule (camera stays on one side of an imaginary line between subjects), the eyeline match (a character's gaze cuts to what they see), the shot/reverse-shot pattern for dialogue, and matching action across cuts so a movement begun in one shot completes in the next. The system became Hollywood's invisible language and spread worldwide as the dominant model of narrative film. Soviet montage theorists like Eisenstein attacked it for being ideologically conservative; the French New Wave broke it for the joy of breaking it. Yet most films still made today — including most experimental ones — depend on its grammar to be intelligible. Learning to see continuity editing is the first step toward seeing how cinema is constructed at all.