Film Analysis

Per assigned, I decided to read an article on “The Verge”, and let me tell you, it was downright startling on the basis of how ethnicities are misrepresented in film production. According to the article, a test called “Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title]” is a new Tumblr project by Welcome to Night Vale’s Dylan Marron. This project is similar to the Bechdel Test, which is meant to gauge gender representation in movies.

The test ran was on 11 main stream films, with the intent of discovering the relative speaking volume of non-white actors/actresses, and the results are as followed. 11 percent of the speaking characters were black, while 5 percent were Hispanic, 4.2 percent wereAsian, and 3.6 percent were other (or mixed race) ethnicities. This revelation can easily reveal how film producers seem to value a white speaking voice over other voices. Not all films may intentional do this, but they reflect how society views caucasian voices.

This is especially distrubing when you analyze how the ratios of speaking reflects the audience of these films. Despite the fact that non-whites make up about 44 percent of the people who go to the movies, and a much higher percentage of people who exist in the world, and this is an obvious exclusion of the people who attend the films.

Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “Someone Has Edited Movies down to Just the Lines Spoken by People of Color.” The Verge. N.p., 9 July 2015. Web. 11 Oct. 2016.

Written on October 11, 2016 by Bear Carlson