Movies: Joan Jonas

Two women kiss....

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....

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

"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 performance and installations, as well as the related installation Cones/May Windows (After Mirage) II (1976/20...

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 reciting "good night" to the camera before retiring for bed. For Jonas, the repurposing of elements from ...

In Upsidedown and Backwards, two fairy tales — The Frog Prince and The Boy Who Went Out to Learn Fear — are told simultaneously, one backwards and one forwards, each interrupting the other. Jonas' ironic use of visual symbolism further inverts the st...

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

Jonas's performance piece, an homage to 18th century French outdoor theater, incorporates mythology as well as spontaneously occurring events into the narrative....

from Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image (2003)...

Wind and Songdelay are two of Joan Jonas’s early performances filmed in the open air, in either natural or industrial environments. Fourteen performers struck together pieces of wood, drew shapes on the ground with props, and used mirrors to refract ...

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 identity, Jonas performs as herself and as her masked double, Organic Honey. Dressed in a feathered he...

"Commissioned by Dokumenta XI in 2002, Jonas' multimedia performance piece Lines in the Sand takes up two works by the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)—Helen in Egypt (1955) and Tribute to Freud (1944)—as source material. Narrated by Jonas, Lines in the S...

Frenetic silhouettes pass us by....

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 Scotia landscape. A dog barks into the distance. A woman enters the frame, looks for the object of the dog...

The video and sculptural installation Ice Drawing (2012) is one component of Jonas’s masterwork installation, Reanimation (2013). It features footage of Jonas creating an abstract drawing using ink and ice (a gesture that she carries out live during ...

Cutting between snowy fields and a raw seashore, Jonas focuses on a group of performers moving through a stark, windswept landscape. The 16mm film — silent, black and white, jerky and sped-up — evokes early cinema, while its content locates it in the...

In the film, Jonas uses video as a diaristic construct to chart the passing of personal time through quotidian ritual. Over three different periods in New York and Nova Scotia, she videotaped herself every day, briefly addressing the camera upon waki...