Screen movement

In an effort to maintain constancy of movement and screen direction various rules were articulated for narrative cinema.

These are preserved today in most sporting telecasts, and are a common feature in all film making. Very schematically, if a character (or car or other moving object) leaves screen left, then it must enter in the next shot from the right hand side of the frame but continue moving screen left. The reverse is also true.

Additionally, if there is movement towards and past the camera, say to the right (so since they have moved towards and past the camera the moving object would exit in the lower right of frame), then the next shot requires that the figure enters from the lower left of the frame - in effect the camera crosses the axis of direction. These concerns about screen direction are used in combination with those that apply to movement across shots.

In these examples constancy of direction is directed towards readerly intelligibility - an assumption being that this consistency will aid the viewer. However it is widely accepted theoretically that the major import of such a practice is as much to conceal the presence of the edit as it is to enhance readerly comprehension.
This constancy is evident in the rescue sequence in Keaton's Our Hospitality, though is broken where the boat plummets over the waterfall.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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assertive image

Image is almost always assertive - and assertion is one of the great "modalities" of actualization, of the semic act.

It appears therefore that the paradigmatic category in film is condemned to remain partial and fragmentary, at least as long as one tries to isolate it on the level of the image. This is naturally derived from the fact that creation plays a larger role in cinematographic language that it does in the handling of idioms: To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it.


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Like a film

Hypertext is not a new feature of print prose, but rather an entirely new medium.

Nevertheless, the development of hypertext bears some similarities to the development of film. A good comparison to the link is the cut (or the splice, depending on how you want to think of it). Like the cut, the link is one feature of a new medium that allows juxtapositions previously difficult if not impossible--and, unlike 3-D glasses, it is an essential component of the medium, not a gimmicky afterthought.

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