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...

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...

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

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

This film was made in the summer of 2006 in Jonas's Nova Scotia home. It reuses the format of a 1976 film in which the artist recorded herself...

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

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...

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

In Mirror Check Jonas uses a small handheld mirror to inspect her naked body in front of an audience. Though her movements were visible to the...

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

The film is an adaptation from two sources: Kinesics and Context by Ray L. Birdwhistell, and Choreomania, a performance by Joan Jonas

Cutting between snowy fields and a raw seashore, Jonas focuses on a group of performers moving through a stark, windswept landscape. The 16mm film...

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

Disturbances extends Jonas' investigation of mirrored surfaces and spaces, as she explores reflections of movement and images in water. The tape...

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