Screen direction

The left-or-right of movement and gaze, kept consistent across cuts. The audience's compass, maintained or deliberately spun.

Screen direction is geography in a medium made of fragments: the journey that exits right should enter the next shot from the left, pursuer and pursued must run the same way, or the chase becomes a collision. Audiences build maps from these vectors and hold the film to them.

Conventions accrete on top, cultures that read left-to-right feel rightward motion as progress, returns as leftward, and productions log direction per scene because errors are invisible on set and glaring in the cut. Reversals, as ever, are vocabulary: turning a journey's direction mid-film is how the pictures say something has changed.