Miss Havisham Lighting

In the scene where Miss Havisham walks down the stairs for the first time, the filmmakers used a good contrast of light and dark. Miss Havisham has a white cloud surrounding her, while everything else around her is dark, this technique is called low-key lighting. This scene is shot from a low angle, making Miss Havisham look bigger, more important, and more superior. They emphasise on Miss Havisham, because she is the main character in that scene. Seeing a scene like Miss Havisham walking down the stairs for the first time go from being described in the book beautifully, to seeing it on the big screen left me speechless. While Miss Havisham is walking down those stairs, there’s a white cloud surrounding her, so you’re not really sure what she looks like. Miss Havisham gives off a ghostly glow, that makes you wonder if she’s a ghost, an angel, a goddess..?
But as Miss Havisham gets to the bottom of the stairs, and the filmmakers do a close up of Miss Havisham, you can clearly see that she isn’t a goddess, but she could very well be a ghost.
Miss Havisham looks dead, withered away. Her hair and skin are white as snow, her lips are dry and cracked, she looks like a skeleton because she’s so skinny. Miss Havisham looks like she’s is living an eternal winter, a cold, icy storm that she can’t get out of - no matter how hard she tries. Miss Havisham is still fully dressed for her wedding; she has on her lace wedding dress, one of her bridal shoes, her veil, even her hair is done up the way it’s supposed to be for her wedding. She is the exact same way she was when she was suppose to get
married. Miss Havisham is stuck in time. In the dining room, where her wedding was suppose to be held, but never happened; nothing has been moved or touched since. Everything is exactly the same, her wedding cake, dishes, table, everything is covered with dust and spider webs, because she won’t let her maid clean anything that has to do with that day. Everything that has to do with Miss Havisham and her wedding has a white glow to it, it looks like it’s ‘haunted’; it’s glowing. Miss Havisham even stopped the time on all of the clocks; to the time where ‘her world stopped’, where her fiance disappeared without a trace. Because of this she is now bitter, cold, and hateful. She doesn’t see the point of living, except to hate men, and to get her daughter estella to hate them to; but the most important thing to Miss Havisham is to teach Estella how to break men's hearts, like the man broke Miss Havisham’s heart that day. As you can see, the filmmakers knew what they were doing with this scene, and they were able to undergo all this pressure about getting this scene just right, and they did - very beautifully. They knew what kind of light and camera angles to use at the right time, when to emphasise certain parts of the scene, and nothing seemed out of place.