10 Most Shocking Jump Cuts In Film History

8. Taking A Ride - Breathless

Not every film which employs striking and surprising use of a jump cut need be from the horror genre, and in fact there's arguably no film more noted for its boundary-pushing use of the jump cut than Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 crime masterpiece Breathless.

The film, a French New Wave riff on Bonnie and Clyde of-sorts, received considerable acclaim for its bold - and at the time, controversial - visual style, underpinned by Godard's unprecedented use of jump cuts to break the established cinematic language of the time.

This most memorably occurs when protagonists Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia (Jean Seberg) are riding around in their car, and Godard jumps between similar shots of Patricia during the ride, depicting the passage of time while also enhancing the urgency of the film's couple-on-the-run narrative.

Though it seems positively rudimentary today, the legacy of this sequence is that it broke down conventions of how a scene could be constructed.

While much meaning has been conferred onto the scene in the decades since, assistant director Pierre Rissient amusingly confessed that it was largely a decision of storytelling economy, to cut out unwanted material in the middle of a continuous take.

Either way, modern filmmaking wouldn't have quite the same fluidity had Breathless not destroyed one of editing's most well-regimented formal rules.