One of the worst movies I've ever seen is called "The Secret Ballot". I bought it in high school because it was in a $5 bin at Blockbuster (annnnnnd those were the days, just by the way. Those. Were. The. Days.) and it had an interesting cover. It was about an Iranian government worker collecting votes on an island over the course of a day, and all of the trouble that came with it: men not wanting to trust a woman with their ballots, entire communities taking their voting cues from one tribal leader, women being told how to vote by their husbands, and the collector herself not knowing where to go next in the middle of an arid, sparsely populated landscape.
A large part of the film was the passage of time, and more specifically the fact that it passed very, very slowly. This was conveyed in the movie with extremely long periods of silence and close up following shots of her driving from place to place, and the dialogue was extended and stilted. It was all very deliberate, I'm sure, but it was a horrifically boring moviegoing experience.
I think that, as a viewer, I would have been much more invested in the idea of time as a...well, almost as a character in the movie, if there had been any point-of-view camerawork in the movie; I would really have liked to be "put in her shoes" if that was the point of the movie.
So! In my opinion, conveying time in an effective and interesting way for film has A GREAT DEAL to do with camera angles.
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