Visual Language
VISUAL LANGUAGE - Jaws
Jaws. The defining film in my life. The first film I remember seeing as a child remains my favorite film of all time. Steven Spielberg was a Welleian 26 years old when he directed this masterpiece and it forever changed the landscape of the Worldwide Box Office, the film formula and Hollywood’s marketing machines.
Theatrical One Sheet
Based on the novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws tells the simple story of a small New England town terrorized by a great white shark but it’s in the 2nd act with what starts as a simple horror story turns into a Moby Dick tale at sea fueled by the 3 archetypes of Chief Brody, Matt Hooper, and Quint, our salty Ahab.
As much as it’s been compared to Melville’s Moby Dick, I don’t recall Dick giving people true fear. What Hitch did with Psycho and shower curtains, Spielberg to this day makes me think of what’s underneath me whenever I step foot into the ocean.
The film is perfect and I chose a very simple sequence too look at. A sequence which on the page was 3 sentences long. Keep this is mind all of you ‘page a minute’ sticklers. How would you have shot this ? How many cuts ? You know the drill. Read the quick passage from the script and then let’s have a look at it, shot by shot.
Quint at ease in his chair, Brody near him, practicing tying
knots. The line starts to move, a few feet at a time; both
men watch. Then the line whizzes off the reel.
Now let’s see how Spielberg takes 3 sentences of script and turns into one of the most memorable scenes in film history.
Next time out shooting a scene take a look at the dramatic vibe of the scene. Use your actors eyes and brief hesitation on the their part to delay that ticking bomb about to go off. Sometimes silence works much better than any noises that may be happening; Spielberg uses a simple underscore that is barely audible, like the shark, it is in the background and undercurrent.
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown in my Visual Language series. I always learn something new and hope you do to. Feel free to comment on this article, especially if you saw something I did not or have any questions.
By the way:
There is a killer documentary on JAWS:
And the TRAILER for it:
BlogMarks
Furl
Newsvine
Rojo
Email This to a Friend
If you like this then please subscribe to the 
Tags: Discussion
5 comments for “VISUAL LANGUAGE - Jaws”
Post a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Categories
ADVERTISERS ARE COOL.
Nice analysis, but you didn’t mention Quint’s cracker. Watch the scene again and notice how Quint is eating crackers while Brody practices tying the knot.
We hear a faint snap as Quint takes a small bite of the cracker, which sounds similar to the faint click the line makes when it is pulled slowly out of the reel. After the first cracker-snap/line-click, Quint eyes the line and goes to take a bite of the cracker, but before he bites it, the line clicks again. Now Quint knows something is up, and he takes the cracker out of his mouth without biting it.
It’s just a little/subtle thing but it really adds to the tension of the sequence. You should go back and watch it again.
Nevertheless, great call in dissecting the “little brown eel” sequence, which is surely a great one.
Thanks for the comment. I will rewatch and look for the cracker; I also realized I wrote ‘Lil Rabbit’ instead of ‘Lil eel’ but was drained from the breakdown.
Hope to see you again !
I’m probably just reading too much into it, but for me, the whole “snap of the cracker and the anticipated click of the line moving in Quint’s reel” thing just facilitated the tension which was already effective thanks to the reasons you described.
Notice when Quint puts the cracker between his teeth as he stares at the line, and then you hear the line click, and then Quint takes the cracker out of his mouth to reveal that he hadn’t bitten it, thus proving that the click we heard was the line moving. It also works with the whole “Brody as audience surrogate” thing, in that it’s another instance in which Quint knows what’s going on before Brody/we does/do.
That brings up one more element of the sequence that merits acknowledgment - after the “ZZZZIP!!” of the spinning reel, all Brody can do is look to Quint and say “What-”, as in “okay, I know I’m a novice out here, but my uneducated guess is that the reel spinning like that means I should be doing something to help you, so tell me what it is, etc.,” all of which can be summed up with “What-”.
[...] See the shot by shot analysis at Cineobscure … [...]
[...] sites. Among other things they offer insightful visual breakdowns of landmark films such as Jaws, War of the Worlds, Christine, Aliens, Braveheart, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tombstone and of course [...]