Jump Cut - History

History

George Méliès is known as the father of the jump cut as a result of having discovered it accidentally, and then using it to simulate magical tricks; however, he tried to make the cut appear seamless to complement his illusions. Dziga Vertof's avant-garde Russian film Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is almost entirely composed of jump cuts. Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard (at the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard's ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible (see image) in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized and its jarring effect deliberate. In the screen shots to the right, the first image comes from the very end of one shot and the second is the very beginning of the next shot — thus emphasizing the gap in action between the two (when Seberg picked up the mirror). Recently the jump cut has been used in films like Snatch, from Guy Ritchie, and Run Lola Run, from Tom Tykwer. It is frequently used in TV editing, in documentaries produced by Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), for example. It is noticeable in Universal Monsters films and music videos