10 Movies That Changed The Genre They Were Made In
7. Breathless
Breathless didn't just change genre, but also cinema as a whole. Directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were the principle creative forces behind the French New Wave movement in film. The movement was focused on breaking from traditional Hollywood editing styles and narrative approaches.
Breathless epitomizes this cinematic maxim by being one of the first noticeable movies to heavily use jump cuts as a device to deepen the way a character is feeling in the moment. The jerky style of editing was perfect for conveying anxiousness and this list would be seemingly endless if I tried to reference every preceding movie that used jump cuts in the same manner.
What makes Breathless more than just another artsy French New Wave experiment is how well Godard's narrative style breaks from the norm. On the surface what you're given is a tale about a criminal who spends time with a girl as he flees from the authorities.
Even audiences at the time had seen that story enough times to know it by heart. Godard took the character archetypes of hardboiled criminal and naive damsel and treated them like real people. By doing this he gave every director after him a new way to approach genre.