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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

Experimental short by Joan Jonas

Moving Off the Land celebrates the ocean and its creatures, biodiversity, and delicate ecology.

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

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...

A Jamaican fisherman describes fishing practices.

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...

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

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

"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...

1992/1994. USA. Directed by Joan Jonas. Presented as a two-channel diptych: Berlin Wall (9:39 min.); Berlin Road (9:35 min.). 19 min.