From the late 1920s, Hollywood's traditional ways of editing feature films had developed in harmony with the primacy accorded to dialogue and story line. In its fundamental approach to both the spatial displacement and the screen direction of moving and stationary objects from shot to shot, all such classic editing emphasized the concept of continuity. According to the continuity principle of editing, scenes opened with an establishing shot that took in the entire space and then cut from this large master to shots within the scene that were selected to maintain a strong sense of matching action throughout. In addition to constructing and defining film space, continuity editing was vital to controlling a movie's manipulation of story time and sequencing. Shots were timed and ordered according to how they advanced the story, its logic, and its emotions; hence, the duration of any shot had little or no intrinsic aesthetic integrity in its own right. Continuity editing assumed that the narrative flow of the story was always primary. All shots included should contribute to a sense of matching action and logical progression of either the plot or of a characters development. "Extraneous" shots that did not advance the story were excluded.
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