Joan Jonas Movies

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...

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

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

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...

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City...

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

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

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

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

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

The video and sculptural installation Ice Drawing (2012) is one component of Jonas’s masterwork installation, Reanimation (2013). It features...

Two women kiss.

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

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

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...

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

Barking is infused with a sense of mystery, the anticipation that something is about to happen. A car is parked outside a house in a rural Nova...

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

Frenetic silhouettes pass us by.

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...