Thursday, 20 September 2012

New Wave Editing Techniques - Jump Cut

During the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) in the 1950's French film makers began to experiment with film form, using new and different ways of editing, which matched the filmmakers youthful energy and visual style as they experimented with different techniques and ways of filmmaking. These techniques were used as a means of changing the expectation of cinema as the films would often involve existential themes that would be filled with irony and sarcasm.

Breathless(1960) - Jean-Luc Godard


One such technique is the use of the jump cut where the shot would suddenly jump to a shot further in time or a different shot entirely, this would jar the audience as the film would unexpectedly jump to a further point of a characters conversation, this is evident in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film "Breathless" (A bout de souffle) during a shot where the male character is driving and having conversation with a woman and his speech suddenly jumps into another topic and the scenery around them with quickly change as the cuts are moving the conversation forward at a faster pace that would seem jarring to the audience as they would not be expecting it.

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