Editing styles are not simply neutral ways of telling stories; they convey different perspectives on art and realism. Film editing can be used either to generate emotions and ideas through the construction of patterns of seeing or to move beyond the confines of individual perception and its temporal and spatial limitations.

Continuity editing proceeds as if organized around continuous human perception—even if there is no clearly identified person driving that perception, as in a series of establishing shots of decreasing distance. In a Hollywood film, editing a scene in the service of narrative continuity and clarity is called analytical editing. In other words, the scene is analyzed or broken down by the camera to direct viewers’ attention from the general perspective of an establishing shot to increasingly more specific views. Continuity style refers to an even broader array of technical choices that support Hollywood’s principle of effacing technique to clarify the narrative and its human motivation.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, continuity editing has been challenged by various alternative practices that we refer to collectively as disjunctive editing. Disjunctive editing is a term that refers not to a single editing system with rules and manuals like Hollywood continuity editing, but rather to a variety of alternative practices that may be organized around any number of different aspects of editing, including spatial tension, temporal experimentation, and rhythmic or graphic patterns. These practices may confront the viewer by calling attention to the editing for aesthetic, conceptual, ideological, or psychological purposes, or working to disorient, disturb, or viscerally affect the viewer. However, in modern filmmaking it is quite possible to find continuity and disjunctive styles in the editing of a single film.