In the well-stocked crime section of a large bookstore, a particular cover catches my eye: on the paperback edition of a 1997 novel titled Transgressions by Sarah Dunant, there is a reproduction – graphically treated, but unmistakable – of a famous image from Maya Deren's experimental short, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943). It shows Deren, the glamorous star of her own, small film, inside a house, at the window, the leaves of off-screen trees lyrically reflected in the glass. As she looks out, wistfully or longingly or perhaps just blankly, she places her hands on the pane.

This image has metamorphosed many times in cinema history – into Anna Karina at a futuristic motel window, Paul Éluard poetry book in hand (Jean-Luc Godard's ALPHAVILLE [1965]); into Annette Benning and Robert Downey Jr, behind the transparent doors of their respective padded asylum cells, gazing down a dark, medical corridor (Neil Jordan's IN DREAMS [1998]); into Caroline Dulcey, lost and tormented in her gleaming, white apartment, in ROMANCE (Catherine Breillat, 1999). Whatever its mutation, the image's meaning is essentially the same: it is a vivid, dreamy, terrifying picture of confinement.

There is something obviously arty and knowing about the Dunant novel – in the choice of cover image, and in its very title, Transgressions.