A Tyranny of Windows: How Jeanne Dielman Weaponized Natural Light

By Osman Arslan Cinematography, Film History January 6, 2026

A Tyranny of Windows: How Jeanne Dielman Weaponized Natural Light

The light that falls into the kitchen of 23, quai du Commerce is a flat, indifferent god. It is a Northern European light, a pale wash of grey and blue that moves with agonizing slowness across the linoleum floor, mapping the passage of a day, a life, a sentence. We watch as it illuminates the back of Jeanne Dielman, her body a bulwark of domestic efficiency, her hands a blur of practiced motion as she peels potatoes. The blade of the peeler catches a brief, metallic glint. The skin of the vegetable falls away in a continuous, hypnotic spiral. There are no dramatic shadows here, no stark chiaroscuro signaling hidden danger in the corners of the room. The terror of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is not concealed in darkness. It is laid bare in the impassive, observational light of day.

For decades, the domestic thriller has thrived on artificiality. It is a genre of calculated revelations, of lamps knocked over in a struggle, of moonlight striping a carpet where an intruder now stands. Its grammar is one of occlusion and manufactured suspense. Akerman, in what remains one of the most radical gestures in cinematic history, rejects this grammar entirely. My contention is that Jeanne Dielman redefines the domestic thriller not by subverting its tropes but by building an altogether new kind of suspense from an opposite principle. The film wields uncontrolled, unadorned natural lighting as a weapon of unraveling identity. It challenges the genre's fundamental reliance on artificial illumination to expose how the rigid routines of bourgeois belonging themselves constitute a form of traumatic imprisonment in post-war Europe. The true thriller, Akerman proposes, is not the disruption of a safe domestic space, but the suffocating, day-in, day-out maintenance of it. The light is not an instrument of revelation; it is the metronome of a slow, psychological implosion.

The Corrosive Clock of Daylight

In the conventional thriller, time is an elastic construct, compressed for action sequences and elongated for suspense. Light and shadow are the primary tools of this temporal manipulation. A ticking clock is often less effective at building tension than the methodical sweep of headlights across a darkened window. Akerman, however, restores to cinematic time its brutal, unyielding reality. Her long, static takes are not merely an aesthetic choice; they are a philosophical and political statement. By forcing us to experience the duration of Jeanne’s labor in something approaching real time, Akerman makes time itself a central antagonist. Natural light is the agent of this antagonism.

Unlike the stylized lighting of a film noir or a Hitchcockian thriller, programmed to direct our gaze and engineer our emotions, the light in Jeanne Dielman is simply there. It enters through the windows and changes according to the hour, indifferent to the human drama it illuminates. It functions as a corrosive timekeeper. Morning light filters into the pristine apartment, signaling the start of another identical cycle of cooking, cleaning, and mothering. As the day progresses, the light shifts, growing warmer, then dimmer, its slow march across the walls a visual measurement of Jeanne’s depleting psychic energy. This temporal function reaches its apotheosis in a seemingly minor detail: the peeling wallpaper in the living room. Under the steady gaze of the camera, bathed in the fading afternoon light, a corner of the paper seems to sag, a barely perceptible flaw in the immaculate facade. In a traditional thriller, such a detail would be a clue, a secret hidden and now found. Here, it is something far more chilling: a symptom of entropy. The peeling wallpaper symbolizes the repressed trauma and systemic decay that no amount of routine can hold back. The daylight does not reveal this decay in a sudden flash; it presides over its gradual, inexorable emergence.

This use of light inverts the thriller’s logic of the reveal. The genre is predicated on the idea that truth resides in darkness, waiting to be brought into the light. For Akerman, the horror is what happens in the light. It is the visible, repetitive, and mundane performance of normalcy that constitutes the real violence. In the spirit of André Bazin’s advocacy for a cinema that respects the spatial and temporal integrity of the pro-filmic event, Akerman allows the scene to unfold without manipulative cutting or lighting. Yet she weaponizes this Bazinian realism. The reality she captures is not one of spiritual grace but of psychological disintegration, where the unforgiving duration of daylight measures the slow death of a soul.

The Alienated Body in a Field of Light

Akerman’s camera, famously locked down at the eye-level of a medium-statured woman, frames Jeanne with a rigorous, almost clinical detachment. Within these static compositions, natural light plays a crucial role in articulating the profound alienation of Jeanne from her own body. The film denies us the close-ups and subjective shots that typically forge audience identification. Instead, we observe Jeanne’s gestures, her mechanical movements as she makes a bed, scrubs a tub, or methodically prepares a veal cutlet. These actions are captured by a light that is descriptive, not expressive. It illuminates the what of her labor, not the why of her interiority.

Consider the scenes of her afternoon sex work. They are treated with the same dispassionate focus as her cooking. After a client leaves, Jeanne straightens the bedspread, every fold precise, the dimming light from the window catching the dust motes in the air. The sunlight on her face as she moves through the apartment is not a soft glow that humanizes her; it is a flat, revealing plane that accentuates the mask-like rigidity of her expression. The shifting patterns of light and shadow on her body as she moves from room to room do not suggest a cohesive, integrated self. Instead, they seem to fracture her, isolating a hand here, a shoulder there, rendering her a collection of functions rather than a whole person. This fragmentation, as later queer theorists would explore in other contexts, visualizes an identity under duress, an identity performed to the point of erasure. Jeanne’s queerness here is not a matter of sexual object choice but a fundamental alienation from the compulsory heteronormative and domestic roles she is forced to inhabit. The natural light, in its very neutrality, becomes the medium for this anti-spectacle, challenging the possessive, eroticizing gaze that Laura Mulvey identified as central to narrative cinema. Akerman’s gaze is not male; it is systemic.

We are not invited to desire Jeanne or even, in a conventional sense, to empathize with her. We are positioned as witnesses to her condition. The light does not provide a window into her soul; it illuminates the bars of her cage. The true horror lies in watching a human being so completely subsumed by ritual that her body operates on a separate track from her consciousness. Every precise, repeated gesture seen in the unchanging light of day is another turn of the screw, tightening the tension until the eventual, violent break.

Economic Precarity and the Slow-Burn Thriller

Released in the mid-1970s, a period of second-wave feminist awakening and lingering anxieties over European post-war reconstruction, Jeanne Dielman is a quiet but devastating critique of the economic structures that invisibly govern women’s lives. Jeanne’s unpaid domestic labor and her clandestine sex work are the twin pillars supporting her bourgeois stability. Her apartment, a place of obsessive order, is also her place of business. It is a microcosm of a patriarchal capitalist system that relies on women’s bodies and labor while simultaneously rendering them invisible. Akerman’s use of naturalism connects this specific Belgian story to a wider cinematic tradition of depicting the textures of the everyday as a site of political struggle.

One can draw a direct, albeit jagged, line from the analog naturalism of Akerman’s Brussels to the digital austerity of Kelly Reichardt’s Oregon. In Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), the harsh, unforgiving daylight of the Pacific Northwest serves a remarkably similar function. It illuminates Wendy’s state of economic precarity with a brutal clarity. There are no expressionistic shadows to soften the grim reality of her predicament; there is only the flat, indifferent light of a gas station parking lot, a Walgreens aisle, a pound. Like Jeanne, Wendy is a woman pushed to the brink by systemic forces. For both, the thriller is not an external event, a pursuing monster, but the slow, grinding pressure of survival. Akerman’s film, seen from our 21st-century vantage point, prefigures this contemporary mode of slow-burn thriller, which locates its suspense in economic and social vulnerability.

This approach also echoes, in a different key, the post-war restraint of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). Ray’s use of available light and his patient observation of a family’s daily struggles in rural Bengal set a precedent for a cinema of quiet desperation. While the contexts of post-colonial India and post-war Belgium are vastly different, both filmmakers understand that the most profound dramas are often played out in the unspectacular light of day. They share a trust in the power of the image to convey emotional and social truths without resorting to melodrama or artificial emphasis. Akerman, with her specific focus on female labor and repressed trauma, channels this realist impulse into a uniquely feminist thriller, one in which the primary threat is not an individual villain but the crushing weight of a social order. Her work forms a crucial bridge between the neorealist depiction of poverty and the contemporary indie film’s critique of late capitalism’s invisible violence.

The Spectacle of the Non-Spectacular

The ultimate radicalism of Jeanne Dielman lies in its complete rejection of genre spectacle. The history of the thriller is a history of stylized fear. Think of the monstrous, distorted shadows of German Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where the set design itself is a manifestation of a tortured psyche. Think of the meticulously controlled lighting in a Hitchcock film, where a pool of light on a staircase or the silhouette of a bird becomes a potent symbol of dread. This is a cinema of artifice, of carefully crafted illusion designed to provoke a visceral response. Akerman’s response is to offer no illusion at all.

The tension in her film builds not through what is hidden, but through what is repeated. We watch Jeanne perform the same tasks on day one, day two, and day three. The horror emerges from the minute variations, the slight hesitations, the small mistakes that signal the breakdown of her perfectly calibrated system. The overcooked potatoes, the fumbled button, the misplaced hairbrush: these are the film’s true moments of suspense. They are terrifying not because they are dramatic, but precisely because they are not. They are cracks in the foundation of a life built on the denial of chaos. The mundanity of the light, its steady, predictable presence, makes these small ruptures feel cataclysmic. In a world defined by absolute order, a single flicker is an earthquake.

This forces the viewer into a different kind of relationship with the film. We are not passive consumers of suspense; we are made complicit in the act of watching. For over three hours, we are confined with Jeanne in her apartment, subjected to her routines, enveloped by the same impassive light. As bell hooks might observe, the film brilliantly dissects the politics of space, revealing the home not as a sanctuary but as a site of patriarchal domination. The aesthetic of anodyne realism becomes a political tool, exposing the violence inherent in the mundane. The climax, when it finally arrives, is shocking in its quietness. The murder is not a grand, theatrical event. It is a clumsy, desperate act followed not by a dramatic escape but by Jeanne sitting silently at her dining room table for an eternity, the room lit only by the blinking neon sign from across the street. The single, flickering lamp that momentarily fails earlier in the evening is the true catalyst, the breaking of a ritual that unleashes the repressed chaos. The artificial light’s failure triggers the collapse that the natural light had presided over for so long.

Jeanne Dielman does not just redefine the domestic thriller; it unearths a deeper, more pervasive thriller that undergirds modern life itself. It suggests that the real horror is not the monster that breaks into the house, but the house itself, a structure of conformity and repression, illuminated day after day by a sun that neither knows nor cares. Akerman’s monumental work is a challenge to how we watch, what we watch for, and where we locate cinematic drama. It asks us to look past the manufactured shadows and into the terrifying clarity of the light.

In our current media landscape, saturated with digital spectacle and algorithmically generated suspense, the stark, analog patience of Jeanne Dielman feels more necessary than ever. It is a potent reminder that cinema’s greatest power may not lie in its ability to create new worlds, but in its capacity to force us to see our own world with new, terrified eyes. The film ends, but the questions it raises linger, suspended in the half-light of Jeanne’s final vigil. The routine is shattered, the system is broken open. But the sun will rise tomorrow, and its light will fall again on the kitchen at 23, quai du Commerce. What, we are left to wonder, will it illuminate now? The most terrifying possibility, and the one most true to Akerman’s profound vision, is that it will illuminate Nothing, a void where a person used to be. The thriller has ended; the existential horror has just begun.

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