Jumpcut film movie#

He had wanted to demonstrate the impossibilityof cutting his film, but what he did turned out to work. But curiously enough, once thebits of film were mounted, the producer considered the result to be ingenious,edited with power, astounding. Then he was forced to do so.So in an act of bravado, he made the cuts himself any which way, at random, inorder to make the film unmarketable.

But the director filmed 8,000 meters the producertold him to cut it down, but the director refused.

Jumpcut film movie#

I know the story behind Breathless and I can tell you it's a corker! Aminor producer had hired a minor director to make a minor crime movie running amaximum of 5,000 meters. Since this film remains a landmark in the history of worldcinema, and is routinely studied as one of the major representatives of lanouvelle vague, the present article may be of some use to students of filmhistory and of current trends in editing, as well as to those interested in thestyles of explanation applied to problems of film esthetics.ġAmong the least flattering explanations offered, is the one proposed bydirector Claude Autant-Lara, who was one of the principal targets in Truffaut'sprovocative essay, 'Une certaine tendance du cinéma français'published in the January 1954 issue of Cahiers du cinéma.Autant-Lara, who considered his own career to have been blighted by the youngnewcomers of la nouvelle vague, hadthis to say about Godard's elliptical editing: To my knowledge, no overview of this type has as yet been proposed inthe literature on Breathless, each commentator having offered a singleexplanation of his or her own, without evoking alternate approaches to theissue.Īlthough the present article contains nopreviously unpublished explanation, it nevertheless represents a departure fromearlier treatments of Godard's now famous jump cuts, in the sense that itillustrates the susceptibility of a given innovation to radically differentexplanatory options.

In the present article, I will present the spectrum ofexplanations that have already been offered, without putting any one of them tothe test.

Richard Raskin Since its eruption onto the film scene in 1959, Godard's Breathless hasgiven rise to a number of very different hypotheses as to what motivated thedirector's radical departure from the practices of continuity editing whenmaking this film. No.6 - The Art of Film Editing Five explanations for the jump cuts