it's common to dismiss many mainstream (Hollywood, Bollywood) movies for their lack of realism; yet, these directors do an awful lot to help the audience 'suspend their disbelief', as Coleridge put it. Indeed, the whole system of filming and editing used in Hollywood - 'classic Hollywood editing' or 'continuity editing' - is designed to create VERISIMILITUDE or 'classic narrative realism'- to make the audience forget that what they are watching is artificial - or art.

Some factors associated with the classic Hollywood style might include the use of authentic costumes, the 180 degree rule, narrative causality, match-on-action editing, shot/reverse shot and synchronised sound.

The match on action technique can preserve temporal continuity where there is a uniform, unrepeated physical motion or change within a passage. A match on action is when some action occurring before the temporally questionable cut is picked up where the cut left it by the shot immediately following. For example, a shot of someone tossing a ball can be edited to show two different views, while maintaining temporal continuity by being sure that the second shot shows the arm of the subject in the same stage of its motion as it was left when cutting from the first shot.

Narrative causality simply means that everything that happens in one of these films happens for a reason; to get to the 'point'. Nothing is random, and actions follow in logical sequence.

You'll notice that many of these techniques aren't actually very 'realistic' at all; in life for example, stuff often happens for no particular reason, or none that leads towards a neat resolution (equilibrium or conclusion.) In this case, directors are striving to create the appearance of realsim - a forgetfulness in the audience - rather than seriously attempting to create a mirror-image of the real world.

But some directors HAVE done that. The long shots, deep focus amateur actors and so on of the Italian Neo Realists, or the more extreme refusal to pander to 'classical' ideas shown by the Dogme 95 group are, in ways, attempts to replicate real life. This 'Realist tendency' (note the capital 'R') in film-making is commonly associated with a socialist or communist ideology dealing, as it often does, with the 'real' problems of 'real' people.

Handy website on Continuity Editing

You can also check this Yale University website which contains an overall summary of editing broken down into:
1. Transitions
2. Matches
3. Duration
4. Styles
5. Montage


IB FILM

KGV EDITING

REALISM

DW Griffith