The Museum of Modern Art is currently showing the Film Series Carte Blanche: Joan Jonas at The Museum of Modern Art from April 25th through April 30th.

Joan Jonas’s lifetime of insatiable movie watching, soaking up classics and newfound discoveries alike, has had a profound impact on the shape and themes of her own moving images, art, and performance work. Presented in conjunction with the gallery exhibition Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, this Carte Blanche program features films that Jonas selected from MoMA’s collection, presented alongside a number of her own rarely screened video works. Taken together, they make vividly evident that, from the earliest days of her experimentation with the new medium of video, Jonas has absorbed and translated the conventions of cinema into her own polyvalent practice.

“I used the language of film in my performances,” Jonas has observed, “the idea of editing, the cut, the montage.” This is especially so with respect to classic Japanese cinema, particularly the work of Yasujirō Ozu (A Story of Floating Weeds, 1934), whose humor and pathos, rhythms and compositions were a guiding spirit for Jonas’s performance work. Classic European and Soviet cinema were a near-daily part of Jonas’s movie diet in the 1960s and ’70s, as represented in this series with an eclectic mix that includes Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945), and Esfir Shub’s revolutionary documentary The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Moreover, in a nod to her fascination with the wonders and strangeness of the natural world and the human body, Jonas has chosen to present Tropical Malady (2004) by the contemporary Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

More information on the exhibition visit moma.org, or click here.

WHAT: Carte Blanche: Joan Jonas

WHEN: April 25th – April 30th WHERE: The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53rd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues New York, NY 10019

TICKETS: Film program tickets are included with Museum admission but require advance reservation. Tickets to just the screening start at $10.

11 West 53rd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues Map
212-708-9400