Joan Jonas Movies

Adaptation of an avant-garde play about Rhoda, a hysterical heroine who feels oppressed by the people around her. She suffers through her birthday...

In this experimental film, Borden explores the dynamics among the members of a woman’s group. As she interviews people who know them, such as...

Jonas intercuts scenes of the Nova Scotia countryside with images of a studio set-up reminiscent of a di Chirico painting. The soundtrack includes...

This short film shot in Iceland and New York, which is based on a thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, features Tilda Swinton as a young woman...

Based on Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “Universe,” Double Lunar Dogs presents a vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a...

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

This piece includes many iconographical elements that have evolved in Jonas’s practice since the early 1970s, including the mirror, the hoop...

This complex and enigmatic work, which is performed by Jonas and Lois Lane, explores female gestures, poses, the body and narcissism. Mirroring each...

Cast as an “electronic erotic seductress,” the multiple costumes and roles performed by Jonas critically examine the ever-changing, but...

He Saw Her Burning, which is based on a 1983 performance, is a provocative narrative collage, a surreal juxtaposition of two narrated texts. A man...

Wind and Songdelay are two of Joan Jonas’s early performances filmed in the open air, in either natural or industrial environments. Fourteen...

In this seminal exploration of the phenomenology of video as a mirror and as "reality," Jonas, face-to-face with her own recorded image, performs a...

Frenetic silhouettes pass us by.

2015. USA. Directed by Joan Jonas. Presented as a two-channel diptych: Green Timeline (3:41 min.); Mirror Timeline (3:48 min.). 7 min.

The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated...

2015. USA. Directed by Joan Jonas. 4 min.

Five-channel video installation which responds to German art historian Aby Warburg’s essay about his visit to the American Southwest.

Jonas's performance piece, an homage to 18th century French outdoor theater, incorporates mythology as well as spontaneously occurring events into...

from Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image (2003)

Two women kiss.