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.
Rounding out this published selection, Ariel Avissar’s “But What Do They Sound Like?” focuses on the first sounds of the films featured in The New York Times’ list. Often heard before the first images appear, these opening notes set the stage for what comes next, establishing mood, tone, genre, time, or place with a single sound, chord, or line of dialogue. The video traces how these opening audio cues can shape our expectations, and listens for recurring patterns and motifs that echo across a quarter century of cinema.
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.
“But What Do They Sound Like?” by Ariel Avissar (the current one, see above) is the sixth and final work in this series:
- “See Under: Orient” by Colleen Laird.
- “Parasite and the Ones Below” by Wickham Flannagan.
- “All About Numbers: 100 Films – 11 Women” by Barbara Zecchi.
- “One Hundred (Lonely) Movies Walk Into a Bar” by Benedetta Andreasi.
- “Seen, Heard: Language Use in the ‘Best Movies’” by Jeffrey Romero Middents.
- “But What Do They Sound Like?” by Ariel Avissar (current).
