The Best New Yorker Videos of 2016

The legendary film editor Walter Murch made a case for the moving image as a sign of the times. “I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others,” he said in 2002. “In the nineteenth century, it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the twentieth century.” In these early years of the twenty-first century, it is digital video that has emerged as a contender for the medium of our age. We no longer have to seek out talking pictures at the theatre or even in our living rooms; they are always at the ready, embedded in social-media feeds and available anytime on the phones carried in our purses or pockets. Like film, video comprises sound and image, and it serves many different purposes. Video can be a captured memory, a document, a witness, a virus, a caper, a “universal dog whistle for joy,” as Carrie Battan wrote when describing videos of dance crazes shared through social media. Video can record the harrowing journey of Syrian refugees making the perilous trek to Europe to seek a better life, or the dazzling display of thousands of pigeons outfitted with L.E.D. lights taking flight in the Brooklyn dusk. Viewers will find, among the best New Yorker videos of the past year, these subjects and more.