A Praise For the Cinematography of Twilight's Seasons Changing Scene
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The Twilight movie series has been the subject of a ton of hate over the years. It gets a lot of criticism for it's poor writing and bad acting, and admittedly, I can agree those things may be a bit of a struggle for the movies. But what I think they succeed in, and what I truly believe made the movies so popular, is their use of cinematography.
For this post, I'll specifically focus on a scene from The Twilight Saga: New Moon. I'm not lying when I say this is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. The scene takes place directly after the main character, Bella, gets dumped by her boyfriend. Bella takes this very hard, and soon becomes depressed and stuck in her room. The scene shows the passing of time for her through this depression.
I cannot overstate how good the cinematography in this scene is. First, let's focus on the use of the seasons changing outside Bella's window. Sure, a movie could just say "3 months later" or have a character say that time has passed, but this scene uses such a wonderfully effective way to show this passage of time. We can see outside Bella's window each of the months that pass and the seasons that come in that time. It feels like time is literally skipping ahead with each view of the window, and I feel like that's so effective to show how time can feel like it's passing when someone is in a depression like Bella is here.
Furthermore, the cinematography of this scene is very repetitive. We see the same spinning rotation of the camera many times, the same pose and facial expression of Bella, the same room. It's all meant to show that nothing is changing for Bella, and nothing feels new or exciting anymore. Further, the camera is literally spinning, which could be a metaphor for how someone in depression could feel like their head is spinning, and that they are lost for direction and stuck in the same place no matter how much they move.
There is so much in this scene that really effectively displays the emotions of Bella's depression, and so much of that really comes from the cinematography of it all. For as much hate as the Twilight movies get, I believe this scene really is a huge cinematic bright spot for the series. It really has no script, minimal acting, just cinematography. And it really nails it.
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