Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, propulsive and poetic ode to Hollywood B-films and macho fatalism is one of the key films of the modern cinema (if not the key film), jettisoning the conventional methods of "professional" filmmaking—seamless editing, psychological realism and audience "suspension of disbelief"—to create a new aesthetic based on rupture, discontinuity, and a constant awareness of the film as a film.