Joan Jonas Movies

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

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...

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

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 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...

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

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

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

1984 video art by Joan Jonas

Two women kiss.

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...

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...

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

Frenetic silhouettes pass us by.

"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...

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

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

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...