Jump cut

's 1908 short film The Tempest, jump cuts are used for some of the visual effects. The effect was used in the early film The Tempest (1908) when Ariel magically disappears and reappears. 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 largely 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 with editor Cécile Decugis cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible in such a way that emphasized the discontinuity between shots to create a deliberate jarring effect. In the clip above the scene abruptly changes perspective, emphasizing a gap in action. Jump cuts have appeared in films like Snatch by Guy Ritchie, and Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer. It is frequently used in TV editing, in documentaries produced by Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel, for example. It is noticeable in Universal Monsters films and music videos. == Notable examples ==

The jump cut sometimes serves a political use in film. Some have used it as an alienating, Brechtian technique (the ) that makes the audience aware of the unreality of the film experience in order to focus attention on a political message rather than the drama or emotion of the narrative. This may be observed in some segments of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. Alexander Dovzhenko used jump cuts in Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1929), in which a close-up shot of a character's face cuts closer and closer a total of nine times. Mark Cousins comments that this "fragmentation captured his indecision ... and confusion", adding that "Although the effect jars, the idea of visual conflict was central to Soviet montage cinema of that time". Jump cuts are sometimes used to show a nervous searching scene, as is done in the 2009 science fiction film Moon in which the protagonist, Sam Bell, is looking for a secret room on a Moon base, and District 9 in which the protagonist, Wikus, searches for illegal objects in the house of Christopher's friend. Jump cuts plays a significant and disorienting role in a scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man. They intersperse shots of Rabbi Nachtner and Larry Gopnik having a conversation in the Rabbi's office with shots of an earlier meeting that Nachtner had with a different person in the same office. In television, ''Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In editor Arthur Schneider won an Emmy Award in 1968 for his pioneering use of the jump cut. Jump cutting remained an uncommon TV technique until shows like Homicide: Life on the Street'' popularized it on the small screen in the 1990s. The music video for "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" makes extensive use of the jump cut. Other uses of the jump cuts include Vincent Gallo's short Flying Christ in which various shots of "Christ" jumping are cut together as he is in mid-jump, creating the illusion of flight, and in many vlogs online, as popularized by the show with zefrank. British comedian Russell Kane has produced a series of comic, satirical videos, named "Kaneings", in response to current events. These make extensive use of jump-cut-style editing. == See also ==