In the first attack there is a big sense of panic when the girl is being eaten, the director builds up more and more of a horrific atmosphere, it suddenly all stops and is quiet. The audience are left to recover from the attack that they have just encountered and everyone is relieved, but there is still a sense of fear that the shark is still out there.
In the second attack a boy called Alex is brutally killed, the director uses silence after the attack the let the audience reflect on the momentum they have just witnessed minutes before. During the instance before the attack, the cameras angle is in the shark’s point of view. This draws attention to the fact that everyone in the water is oblivious that the shark is there, causing the attack to come as more of a shock.
The audience know more about the action underwater, than the characters do.
A zooming shot is used in this scene, to show the sharks movements in the water and the stages in which the shark becomes closer and closer to its prey.
During the course of the second attack, different shots are used to create effect. Brody is constantly worried about the people swimming in the water .The Camera ses close-ups to show Brody’s concern. The camera also shows a wide range of shots of the sea, it often shows the children in the sea splashing. The audience therefore are curios and do not know what to expect. The link is then made, that the shark reacts to strong movements in the water. The music then kicks in and the audience associate the shark to the music.
The director uses false alerts to build up the audience’s expectations; the audience are affected by this and think that every time the music starts then there will be an attack. Spielberg doesn’t want constant killings though, this would make the film a lot more predictable.
This is why he chooses to make the killings a lot more irregular.
An example of an irregular killing is when a girl screams just before the second attack, an audiences instant reaction would be to assume the shark was there. It turns out that there isn’t an attack and someone she knows is just lifting her up into the air. The audience then relax later to find out that number two attack takes place, they get the feeling of not knowing when to relax in case of another attack, they are kept on their toes. In another instance of a fake alert, two men are in a boat attached to a jetty, looking out for the shark. As would be expected a shark starts coming towards the jetty, the audience are thinking that the shark will attack the men in the boat, but they get out of the boat, just in time.
On the 4th of July, two children play a trick on the people visiting beach resort Amity, the audience are expecting another attack to take place but nothing happens, a little later another attack occurs and the audience can’t keep up, false alerts keep occurring.
The director builds up a sense of fear of the shark by not allowing the audience to see all of the shark near the beginning of the film, the size of the shark (as seen in the last scene) comes as more of a shock to the audience. Steven Spielberg has only shown small snippets of it and not the whole thing in earlier parts of the film.
Towards the beginning of the film, no-one really knows the dangers of the shark as it is not seen, people understand that it is a ferocious creature and has the instinct to kill but not that it has the desire to rip people into shreds, it is unseen.
In the last section of the film, out at sea, the audience gather that the shark is intelligent and powerful. Hooper suspects that if they attach the yellow barrels to the shark, then it will stay on the surface of the water. He is proven wrong and the shark drags the barrels down, the audience now know how big this shark really is.
When some fishermen on the island catch a shark Hooper (oceanographer) discovers that the bite marks, shown on chrissy the first victim, are different to the teeth on the shark that has been caught, he believes that this is bigger than most sharks and this is when we realise that the shark is “big”.
After the second attack Brody flicks through images of sharks, blood, death, teeth and real victims, most of the time a story would be made up, but having this bit in the film creates reality the audience now know that this happens in real life.
Whilst on the boat in the last scene, Brody is feeling worried about the severity of the shark and what it could do to him, we feel sorry for him as he has a family back in Amity and the audience know that he has a strong relationship with his family.
In this scene, the shark is seen in the water from a high angle shot, it is bigger than the boat and later we witness the shark biting into the boat, it has the strength to sink it.
During this scene the music varies, it switches from being exciting adventure music, when Brody, Hooper and Quint are in control to eerie and low pitched when the shark is in control. The music is sometimes epic. When the music is epic, then the audience do not know who is in control.
When the attacks are taking place, the victims are made human for instance chrissy, the girl swimmer at the start is dragged around ferociously and there is constant screeching and screaming, there director has created a sense of her being alone in the sea and there is no-one there to help her.
Brody is slapped by Alex’s mother (the boy eaten in the second attack), we instantly feel sorry for him, as we know it is not his fault for the killing.
The story is deliberately structured to build tension and fear to keep the audience interested. The first two attacks are close together to build up a hate for the shark.
Brody’s son being involved in one of the attacks is important for the film because Brody would not have had the guts to go out to sea if it hadn’t of happened, the director chose one of the attacks to be on July the 4th because lots of people would have been in the scene.
In my view, the highest point of tension in the film was when Hooper, was in the metal cage being lowered into the water, this made me feel uncomfortable knowing that the shark was out there. I think Spielberg did a fantastically good job of using filming devices to build up suspense and entertain his audience.