Vertigo

The shot of a struggling Alex Kintner being pulled under by the shark is obscured by billowing clouds of his own blood, just as the mutilated corpse of the shark will later obliterate the screen with a cloudy red. The camera cuts to a shot of Brody's reaction. He is positioned in the dead centre of the screen with his wife immediately behind him. On either side of the frame are grassy sand dunes, and in the background, separating the land from a strip of blue sky, are the blurry slats of the same kind of fencing that dominated the movie's opening scene. The shadow of a beach hut darkens the bottom left corner of the frame.

In the novel Brody learns of the second attack by telephone, experiencing first a 'twinge of unease [in his] stomach' before feeling 'flushed, almost feverish.' The film reproduces this sickening sensation through a camera movement in which the character and the background seem to be operating in different dimensions. The image pushes in towards Brody so that his head and shoulders occupy marginally more of the frame. At the same time the strip of sand behind him seems to stretch like rubber. In contrast to the movement towards the seated figure of the chief, there appears at the same time to be a movement away from his position that allows elements previously unseen (such as the side of one of the beach huts) to become visible within the frame.

It doesn't require any great technical knowledge of film making to know that if you move a camera closer to an object, it will occupy more of the image space, and that if you move it away from the object it will show more of the surroundings. What this shot - known as a dolly zoom - does is combine the two concepts into a single image, creating a distorting push-me-pull-you effect. The shot was first used in commercial cinema by Alfred Hitchcock for scenes in Vertigo to convey the paralysing effects of Scottie Ferguson's fear of heights. Hitchcock explained the origin and the development of the idea to Francois Truffaut in the Sixties:

'I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn't do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and the zoom simultaneously [...] so that's the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.'

Interestingly, although Vertigo was released in 1958 there were no immediate imitations of the effect by other filmmakers. In fact, Jaws was the movie that helped establish it as a device for conveying shock, and it has been much used since then - to the extent that today it has become enough of a cliche to be the object of irony. Spielberg used the shot in later films (including E.T and Schindler's List) and it was also employed by John Landis for the moment when Michael Jackson is transformed into a zombie in his Thriller video.

Brody's moment of vertigo is accompanied by a distorting string effect in the music score, just as Hitchcock had used Bernard Herrmann's frenzied harp glissandi to underline the drama of his shot. The distorted perspective not only induces a feeling of unease in the viewer, but also serves to highlight Brody's own sense of helplessness. He is literally rooted to the spot, momentarily unable to move.