The shot of the
estuary victim’s severed leg sinking to the sea bed is a detail that might have
come directly from the original novel. Whereas Benchley tends to linger over
the visceral details of the shark attacks, Spielberg shows us only brief
glimpses – the severed arm on the beach, the torn yellow raft in the bloody
surf, the dismembered head of Ben Gardner, and here the sneaker-shod leg
leaving a trail of blood as it sinks to the sea bed. The next shot of the upturned red hull of the
rowboat and the mirroring crimson pool blooming beside it on the surface of the
water has a grisly poetry to it. There is a cut to tourists gathering on the
beach and then we are back on the water, with a bravura swerving camera
movement as the shark swims directly at and then past a petrified Michael
Brody.
As originally planned and shot, the estuary scene would have been even gorier, but when Spielberg looked at the first assembly, he decided it was “too bloody” and recut it. The idea was to have the victim - clamped in the shark’s jaws - grab hold of Michael Brody and then release him as the fish submerges. This concept helps to explain why the swerving POV shot of the shark swimming towards Michael is above water: it was originally conceived to be the view of the prey, not the predator. After the boy’s close encounter with the shark, the camera holds on a close-up of his fightened face as muffled timpani beat on the soundtrack. A reverse shot of the people on the beach shows the shark’s fin slicing through the water and then we cut to the bridge, framed like one of Kubrick’s favoured one-point perspective shots. As Brody runs across the road and vaults first one rail and then the other, we hear someone shout – in a sly moment of foreshadowing – ‘Someone get a gun! Get a gun and shoot it! Does anybody have a gun?’ The next shot of Brody running across the beach is obscured by the thick wooden posts of the bridge. A panning shot shows Ellen running along the bridge’s walkway behind the rail. Both shots reinforce the movie’s visual motif of fences, which suggests how ineffectual these barriers are to incursion by outside forces. Brody rushes to the water’s edge and helps pull his son onto the beach. The light on the water has a bright silvery sheen to it, and the glare has the effect of giving an almost sepia tone to the image. The shot of the unconscious boy and his legs being dragged across the wet sand seem to encourage us to think the worst, and indeed when Ellen breaks through the circle of onlookers her first words are: “He’s dead.” The line is a call back to the light-hearted words of encouragement the mother gave her son in the kitchen (“I think you’re going to live”) when she was cleaning his cut hand. Brody, no doubt trained in basic first aid, disagnoses shock and runs up the beach, snapping towels from the sand. There is a brief cut-away shot of Sean, the younger son, distressed by the actions of his father, and his cries merge with the sobbing of his mother on the soundtrack. With Ellen wrapping the towels around her son and keening over his inert form, Brody rises as the camera tilts up. He occupies the left hand side of the screen and stares out of the frame. Both the expression on his face and the rising horn motif of the score signal that he has reached a moment of decision. The next shot shows us his point of view: the open sea framed by the wooden piles of the bridge. The camera pushes forward until the whole screen is filled with only sky and the deep blue sea.
As originally planned and shot, the estuary scene would have been even gorier, but when Spielberg looked at the first assembly, he decided it was “too bloody” and recut it. The idea was to have the victim - clamped in the shark’s jaws - grab hold of Michael Brody and then release him as the fish submerges. This concept helps to explain why the swerving POV shot of the shark swimming towards Michael is above water: it was originally conceived to be the view of the prey, not the predator. After the boy’s close encounter with the shark, the camera holds on a close-up of his fightened face as muffled timpani beat on the soundtrack. A reverse shot of the people on the beach shows the shark’s fin slicing through the water and then we cut to the bridge, framed like one of Kubrick’s favoured one-point perspective shots. As Brody runs across the road and vaults first one rail and then the other, we hear someone shout – in a sly moment of foreshadowing – ‘Someone get a gun! Get a gun and shoot it! Does anybody have a gun?’ The next shot of Brody running across the beach is obscured by the thick wooden posts of the bridge. A panning shot shows Ellen running along the bridge’s walkway behind the rail. Both shots reinforce the movie’s visual motif of fences, which suggests how ineffectual these barriers are to incursion by outside forces. Brody rushes to the water’s edge and helps pull his son onto the beach. The light on the water has a bright silvery sheen to it, and the glare has the effect of giving an almost sepia tone to the image. The shot of the unconscious boy and his legs being dragged across the wet sand seem to encourage us to think the worst, and indeed when Ellen breaks through the circle of onlookers her first words are: “He’s dead.” The line is a call back to the light-hearted words of encouragement the mother gave her son in the kitchen (“I think you’re going to live”) when she was cleaning his cut hand. Brody, no doubt trained in basic first aid, disagnoses shock and runs up the beach, snapping towels from the sand. There is a brief cut-away shot of Sean, the younger son, distressed by the actions of his father, and his cries merge with the sobbing of his mother on the soundtrack. With Ellen wrapping the towels around her son and keening over his inert form, Brody rises as the camera tilts up. He occupies the left hand side of the screen and stares out of the frame. Both the expression on his face and the rising horn motif of the score signal that he has reached a moment of decision. The next shot shows us his point of view: the open sea framed by the wooden piles of the bridge. The camera pushes forward until the whole screen is filled with only sky and the deep blue sea.
