Every Single Word Spoken Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jul 15 2015

Location: 

Online

Dylan Marron is a Venezualan-American actor, writer, and director who noticed something about the film industry: in most of the major films, people like him (and other non-white groups) were not being well represented.

Taking to Youtube, he started the series titled "Every Single Word [spoken by a person of color]". This collection of videos, started in July 2015 and still ongoing, cuts together all of the times a person of color, be they on screen or off screen, named or extra, obviously visible or in prostheses and make-up, says any word.

This frightening compilation cuts down movies, some many hours long, down to under a minute. The recent film adaptation of Into the Woods, for instance, shows the title screen and the movie's theme song followed by silence, ending after 7 seconds and an empty credits screen.

The data isn't skewed either direction by sampling either. For instance, some of the videos are minutes of footage, and they would be longer if he include periods of silence, which some movies have a profound amount of. Marron isn't selecting based on directors or producers; he is simply picking movies that he enjoyed. In doing so, he is demonstrating how systemic this issue is, rather than the explicit decision among some film industry professionals to exclude people of color.

To view this work, click here.

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