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.
Some have used it as an alienating, Brechtian technique (the Verfremdungseffekt) 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.
Mark Cousins comments that this "fragmentation captured his indecision ... and confusion",[2] 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.
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.