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Movies are about so much more than what you see on the screen. The cultural and historical context of all movies — from the big Hollywood blockbusters to the smallest independent films — cannot be ignored when watching. That’s a message University of San Diego communications and film studies professor Eric Pierson shares in his classes and on this episode of Name Drop San Diego. He says that looking at the way people entertain themselves in a particular place or time in history is essential to understanding who they are as human beings.
Pierson is an expert on portrayal of people of color in film and television, film production and distribution and other topics in the area of media and media literacy. Listen to our interview with him on the podcast player above or on any of these listening apps:
Apple | Spotify | Google | Stitcher
On his priorities for teaching film:
A film is never just a film. It’s never just entertainment. … In my film and cultural politics course, I’m taking films and connecting them to cultural moments saying, ‘This film happened at this time and here is how the conversation around the film was relevant to the cultural conversations at that time.’ I always tell students to ask themselves, ‘Why this film, now"> (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd&cid=1ffe15d6-eb53-11e9-b4d2-06948452ae1a'; cnx.cmd.push( function() { cnx( { playerId: "8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd" } ).render( "11982501ceb44352bd1e95848c612274" ); } );
I was having a conversation with a student about whether a studio could make ‘Blazing Saddles’ today, whether that film could get made in our cultural climate. If the answer is, ‘I don’t think so,’ then the question is ‘What is it that was happening when the film was made that made this OK?’ And not to, you know, judgment on the moment and say we weren’t as sophisticated about these issues at that time, but I think that you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they entertain themselves. … If you want to have an archeological conversation with a culture, then, ask yourself, ‘How did they entertain themselves?’ That will tell you more about what they were as a people than other things that you might be looking at. … What does this film tell us about what’s happening in this moment outside of the world of the film?
What genre of film do you not like to watch?
I don’t really like horror films, which are different from science fiction. I’m not a big horror film fan at all.
What’s the best class you’ve ever taken?
In graduate school, I took a class on the history of television. It really did change the way I thought of television. Television was this free thing that was on in the background. It forced me to think differently about the industry and how the industry operated and why it did what it did.
What book had the greatest impact on you?
‘Catcher in the Rye’ because it made me realize that as a person of color I had to be fed my literature from other sources. I just in high school [thinking], I do not like Holden Caulfield, and I don’t know why other people do, and there has to be a reason why I’m feeling this way, so I need to find other books that I can look to.
On choosing what to watch:
I think that critics and criticism still matter. So I think one of the things that has gotten harder to do, but it’s not impossible, is to find critics that you are willing to read. And not critics that you always agree with, but just people who engage you in an interesting conversation. … And take some risk. The job of the little description is to get you to be interested, so it doesn’t give you a lot of nuance. So you have to challenge yourself sometimes and understand a film is never just a film, there’s always other things going on. So you wanna ask yourself, what are these other things that are going on in the world right now that helps to to understand why this at this moment in time? That doesn’t mean you can’t watch things because you’ve got an hour to fill and you don’t want to do the laundry. But it is important for our minds to always be working, for people to be media literate so they’re always asking questions.
Name Drop San Diego is an interview podcast featuring interesting people in, around and from San Diego. Previous guests include musicians, chefs, scientists, and beloved locals like Tony Gwynn Jr. New episodes drop every Tuesday in your favorite listening app.
