How the audience engages from the opening scene of Jaws.

How the audience engages from the opening scene of Jaws.

Jaws starts with a scene of two people, a man and a woman, running down the sand banks of beach in the evening. Therefore, this means that the scene has  low key lighting, pushing forward the genre of mystery and horror. the lighting stays low key throughout the two minutes of the opening, the only time that the lighting changes is when the camera uses an underwater shot, looking up at the swimmer. In this shot, most of the scene is very dark with a single bright circle shining through the water, which is presumably the sun. Due to the low lighting, we can only really see the shadow/silhouette  of the two characters.

 For the first half of the opening, the sound is not as loud, as we only hear a small amount of dialogue between the two characters, some seagulls making noise and a bell ringing in the distance, most probably from a boat. This is done intentionally to make the audience think about what is going to happen, as this is an unusually calm opening scene to a film. In the dialogue between the two characters, we only find out a very limited amount of information as they are running much distance between them. We find out that woman is called Chrissie, and they are going to swim in the sea. We also hear the man in the scene say “I’m not drunk” and slur his words, meaning this is used in irony as the man is quite obviously drunk, and we can presume that Chrissie is too. In the second half of the opening sequence, Chrissie is in the sea on her own, and the scene is almost silent up until the moment she encounters the shark. After this, she screams, cries and moves about a lot in the water, creating hysteria and panic in the scene. This could make the audience feel sympathetic, especially when she is released by the shark for a brief minute and she begins to scream prayers to God. This could then interest the readers more as something interesting is happening.