Edward Dmytryk’s 1949 film Give Us This Day (aka Christ in Concrete) is a brilliant example of film noir in terms of the visual motifs it chooses to employ in order to tell the story of Geremio (Sam Wanamaker), his friends, and his family. Of these visual techniques that I am referring to, and which J.A. Place and L.S. Peterson describe in great detail in Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir, the most obvious is the non-traditional lighting style. As some of my classmates have mentioned, three-point lighting is abandoned, and low-key lighting predominates. However, low-key lighting is also occasionally interjected with hard direct lighting – especially during choker close ups of characters’ faces during dramatic scenes – and with lighting that does not come from traditional sources (i.e. the key light, the fill light, and the back light) but rather from light sources placed in bizarre locations to create offbeat schemes of light and dark on the characters’ bodies and faces.
Another example of a film noir visual motif that is consistently utilized during the film is claustrophobic framing. There are many scenes in which objects are placed in front of Geremio in order to create a feeling of claustrophobia and entrapment. When he walks out of the apartment building in the first scene – after Annunziata (Lea Padovani) kicks him out – the spikes on which he impales his hand are directly in front of him in the frame. During the wedding, when he admits to Luigi (Charles Goldner) that he has not told his new bride the truth about owning a house, bars across the two men’s faces act as a barrier between them and the camera. When Annunziata lies in bed because she is in labor and Geremio leans over her – as he implores her to let him get a doctor – the scene is shot through the bars of the bed’s headboard. When Geremio is shown shoveling snow, it is through a glass door.
Depth of field is also heavily utilized within Dmytryk’s film. This visual technique is most obvious in scenes where characters are placed on three different planes within the frame, such as in the first scene, where a drunken Geremio comes home. He is closest to the camera; his haggard wife is on a second plane; and his oldest son, Paul, is further back; however, they are all in sharp focus. When Annunziata is in labor, she is closest to the camera, Geremio is on the second plane, and the superstitious midwife stands further back, but again, they are all in sharp focus and clearly visible. (Interestingly enough, because of how unbalanced framing (a technique I’m not actually going to discuss in this post) is utilized, Geremio seems to dominate in both of these scenes, regardless of which plane he is in, and the other characters shrink in comparison.)
Though these are examples of when depth of field is most apparent to the viewer, I believe that it is most effective when it is used to carry bold architectural lines. The clearest example of this – and the one that is repeated several times throughout the film – is the scene where a drunk Geremio finishes climbing up the stairs in his apartment building and stops to rest at the beginning of a hallway. Because of the greater depth of field that is being utilized, the architectural lines of the hallway are in sharp focus and seem to carry on for a great distance into the darkness. It gives the viewer the sense that s/he and Geremio are in a nightmarish world, where – regardless of how long he runs – he can never reach the end of the hallway. He can never escape the maze he is trapped in.
And though he tries to redeem himself, in the end, he truly cannot escape the maze that he has trapped himself in. As the eponymous “Christ in Concrete,” he dies for his own sins. But by doing so, he does manage to provide salvation from the maze for his wife and children – he finally gets Annunziata that house she always dreamed of – and this salvation is brilliantly displayed in the final shot of the film. The widow and her children are leaving the insurance office, and once again, depth of field is employed to bring focus to the long hallway down which they are walking. However, whereas in previous scenes, the hallways always disappeared into the darkness, there is finally a visible “light at the end of the tunnel” – an exit out of the building but also an exit out of the maze.
