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...

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

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

Short movie by Joan Jonas.

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

Two women kiss.

Mirage was designed specifically for the screening room of Anthology Film Archives in New York's SoHo neighborhood, where Joan Jonas first performed...

In Upsidedown and Backwards, two fairy tales — The Frog Prince and The Boy Who Went Out to Learn Fear — are told simultaneously, one...

In the film, Jonas uses video as a diaristic construct to chart the passing of personal time through quotidian ritual. Over three different periods...

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...

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...

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