Cinema
20th century

Jump Cut

Jean-Luc Godard broke cinema's oldest rule and, in doing so, invented a new grammar for it.

FR  —  An abrupt cut between two shots of the same subject that breaks the continuity of time

Jump Cut is an abrupt cut between two shots of the same subject that breaks the continuity of time.

A jump cut splices together two shots of the same subject taken at slightly different moments or camera positions, producing a visible, jarring 'jump' rather than the smooth continuity classical editing is built to disguise. Early cinema treated the jump cut purely as an error to be avoided — continuity editing exists precisely to hide the cut. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) turned the mistake into a manifesto, repeatedly jump-cutting within a single unbroken conversation to compress time, unsettle the viewer, and announce that the French New Wave had no interest in Hollywood's invisible seams. The technique has since become a standard tool for conveying urgency, comedy, or the passage of time within a single scene, used everywhere from music videos to modern vlogging, where a speaker jump-cuts between takes to remove pauses without changing the shot.