Jump cut is an abrupt edit between two shots of the same subject, breaking continuity and drawing attention to the cut itself.
A jump cut is an edit between two similar shots that violates the unwritten rules of continuity editing — the figure moves abruptly within the frame, time appears to skip, the seam shows. For decades Hollywood treated jump cuts as mistakes. Then Jean-Luc Godard made them the defining gesture of 'À bout de souffle' (Breathless, 1960). Cutting his rough assembly down for length, he and editor Cécile Decugis chose to remove fragments from the middle of shots rather than entire scenes, and the result felt electric — restless, modern, alive to its own artifice. The technique announced the French New Wave to the world and licensed two generations of filmmakers, music-video directors, and YouTubers to break the smooth surface of the cut deliberately. The jump cut is now the visual grammar of online speech itself: every vlog and explainer that snaps from one phrase to the next is using Godard's tool.