With the advent of DVDs, the idea of a “final cut” is a thing of movie past. Now when thinking and writing about a film, one must look beyond the given frame and take into account a much larger cinematic space that includes deleted scenes, outtakes, interviews, featurettes, production photos, storyboards, and commentaries. In other words, what’s “in” and “not” in the film, what is or could have been the story. As a cinematic tribute to yet another summer nearing its apex, Jaws, the now tri-decade pop-culture phenomenon, was recently screened on TV as part of a four-day marathon on channel My9. After viewing Jaws on TV in New York City, I also watched the wide-screen 30th Anniversary Edition on DVD. Disc One contains thirteen minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes as well as an on-location featurette filmed on Martha’s Vineyard for British TV on May 6, 1974.

In light of these deleted scenes and outtakes, and given Jaws’ infamous production history widely documented in a variety of forms, I’ve decided to revisit Jaws to reflect on the movie it could have been, and despite the now-included cuts, in an abstract way, still is. Even if scenes go unused and end up on the cutting room floor, they were still written, acted, and shot, and therefore occupy some spectral, or analogous, presence in the cinematic narrative, resulting in a film double or cinematic imaginary that deserves consideration. As a reprocessing of scenes, or, as the film critic Nigel Andrews put it in his book on Jaws, “scenes collected from the artist’s bigger canvas,” DVD extra-features result in a thematic and informational reassembly. Things are cropped, cut, panned, or reformulated to accommodate certain cultural or technological criteria endemic of any made-for, or made-to-fit, context. The pan-and-scan process, “whereby a widescreen film’s images are cropped, lopped, and otherwise mutilated to fit the full frame of the squarer television screen,” Andrews writes, can be seen as the reverse of the DVD auxiliary, which seeks to supplement the viewer with more, rather than less-than the original.

Up until a few years ago, when I experienced my first theater screening of Jaws in London (in conjunction with an ICA panel hosted by the film critic Antonia Quirke, who wrote a BFI Classic on Jaws, and the release of the wide-screen DVD 30th Anniversary edition of the movie), I had only ever seen Jaws on full-screen TV. Whereas the full-screen telefilm versions of movies conform to whatever-fits-the-frame, it can be argued that the widescreen DVD, in tandem with the extra-feature, is everything-that-didn’t-fit-the-frame-before or everything-we-can-now-cram-into-it-and-more. Further, while full-screen TV movie adaptations are guilty of artistic depletion and a “mono-dimensionality…[in order to] prioritize Primal Story Information and to let background, ambience and subsidiary visual detail, all the things that enrich a large-screen film, go hang,”(Andrews) the extra-feature, with its mythopoeic emphasis on production (behind-the-scenes and deleted footage), makes the frame frameless and infinitesimal in its variation. Panning-and-scanning, writes Andrews, “is what the audience must know to follow the plot or get its point…The effect of the pan-and-scan process is to reduce a large-screen movie to this elementary information feed.” That is, in pan-and-scan format, the movie Jaws gets reduced to the most literal definition of the shark (an eating machine chewing at the scenery). With the special feature additions, however, the movie is not just restored to its intended holistic glory, but to a life that extends far beyond the given (wide) screen and connects to not just cinema as a whole, but to the reception of and relationship we have to the stories behind cinematic images. As a movie that has had a powerful and reverberant cultural life off-screen, the same life that created the screen’s fictional response to begin with, Jaws’ context continues to be feverishly nourished and added to.