Mondo Knows Facts
Breathless used jump cuts to break continuity
Jean-Luc Godard cut inside scenes, making time appear to skip In Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard removed frames from the middle of continuous takes, so characters seem to twitch and time to leap forward. The technique broke the rule that edits should be invisible. It became a signature of the French New Wave and is now routine in music videos and advertising. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Conversation scenes are built from opposing camera anglesShot and reverse shot are filmed separately and edited to look continuousMelies found the substitution splice by accidentA jammed camera turned a passing bus into a hearse, and he used itThe negative cutter assembles the original filmThey match the edit list to the camera negative and cement each shot in orderPsycho's shower scene took 78 camera setupsThe sequence runs about 45 seconds and has roughly 52 cutsThe Kuleshov effect shows how editing makes meaningThe same face was cut against different images and read differentlyThe 180 degree rule keeps screen space consistentCameras stay on one side of an imaginary line between two people
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Tags: editing, french-new-wave, 1960
Breathless used jump cuts to break continuity: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Jean-Luc Godard cut inside scenes, making time appear to skip. The figure is taken from BFI, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.