Joan Jonas Movies

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...

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

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...

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

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

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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...