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...

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...

"Shot vertically and intended to be shown on a video monitor turned on its side, the video May Windows (1976) is a component of the Mirage...

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 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...

Frenetic silhouettes pass us by.

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

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...

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...

"Commissioned by Dokumenta XI in 2002, Jonas' multimedia performance piece Lines in the Sand takes up two works by the poet H.D. (Hilda...

Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy is based on Jonas' 1972 performance of the same name, the first in which she used video. In an enigmatic ritual of...

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

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

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

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

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

In this early work, Jonas translates her performance strategies to video, applying the inherent properties of the medium to her investigations of the...

1984 video art by Joan Jonas