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.
When the New York Times revealed the final batch of 20 films, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the top film in the list was not a film in English, historically the overwhelmingly dominant language of most cinema seen in the United States. English may be my first language, but it is not my only one – and I am often frustrated by how cinema study, particularly in video essay form, perpetuates this dominance of the English language. And yet even a casual glance at this list showed that movies still travel and that there is a symphony of languages put forth in these films. My curiosity was piqued: I wondered how many languages were heard amongst these “top 100 films,” that if we heard them all, how much of the world would we hear?
The video essay presents the language use in decreasing order of the number of humans who can understand a particular language at the quarter-point of the 21st Century (beginning with English and ending, of course, with Heptapod-A, ostensibly only understood by a single person, Dr. Louise Banks, in Arrival). I have left the majority of the text in the original languages – and not provided subtitles – in order to privilege the sounds, the rhythm, the music of those languages. But in researching the essay, other questions arose: how is it possible, for example, that the third-most spoken language in the world, Hindi, is not heard in even one of these films, not even in passing? On the one hand, the New York Times list shows that our global cinematic world is still multilingual; on the other hand, the supposed “best” of that cinematic world still reflects and refracts certain cultures while overlooking/ignoring others. Like it or not, lists like these end up curating the canon of “world cinema” writ large. Perhaps this linguistic survey says more about the lists we make than the languages we hear at the movies.
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.
“Seen, Heard: Language Use in the ‘Best Movies’” by Jeffrey Romero Middents (the current one, see above) is the fifth work in this series. Links to the rest will follow, when they get published during the next weeks:
- “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 (current).
- “But What Do They Sound Like?” by Ariel Avissar.
