The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century: “Parasite and the Ones Below…”

This video was made as part of “One Hundred Movies Walk into a Bar…” – a collaborative videographic workshop organized by Ariel Avissar and Colleen Laird during the summer of 2025. The workshop was conceived as a collective response to The New York Times’ recently-published list, “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century.” Participants were prompted to treat this list as a generative provocation, inviting critique, remix, reflection, and play. The resulting pieces were diverse in tone and form, ranging from experimental collage to critical commentary, but all emerged through a shared process of communal creation, screenings, feedback sessions, and iterative revision. A selection of these is published here in 16:9, and the entire collection is curated here.

Wickham Flannagan’s “Parasite and the Ones Below…” explores the inherent connotations of being one of the ninety-nine below the eternal number one. To deconstruct the meaning from this kind of relationship, this video essay is a juxtaposition between the top of the mountain and the titular ones below, exploring not only their visual similarities, but also their thematic repetitions. Within this list of greats, such a hierarchy is not ultimately as important as the communal connections that all one hundred of these movies share.

Facts

16:9 is publishing six selected works form the collaborative videographic workshop “One Hundred Movies Walk into a Bar…” organized by Ariel Avissar and Colleen Laird during the summer of 2025.

“Parasite and the Ones Below…” by Wickham Flannagan (the current one, see above) is the second work in this series. Links to the rest will follow, when they get published during the next weeks:

1. “See Under: Orient” by Colleen Laird.
2. “Parasite and the Ones Below” by Wickham Flannagan (current).
3. “All About Numbers: 100 Films – 11 Women” by Barbara Zecchi.
4. “One Hundred (Lonely) Movies Walk Into a Bar” by Benedetta Andreasi.
5. “Seen, Heard: Language Use in the ‘Best Movies’” by Jeffrey Romero Middents.
6. “But What Do They Sound Like?” by Ariel Avissar.