Voices John E Davidson
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John E. Davidson: I guess a basic question that I ask is, why am I looking at this as a film? Why does it matter that this is a film? Why am I not just reading a script? Why am I not just looking at a plot summary? What is it that film does that's different to those kinds of things? And it impacts viewers in all sorts of ways that go beyond the simple narrative. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: Joining me today is John E. Davidson, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. [00:01:00] He is the founding Director of Ohio State's Film Studies program, which gave rise to the Moving Image Production major, both of which are part of the Department of Theater, Film and Media Arts.

He is also a recipient of the President's and Provost Distinguished Faculty Service Award for serving as the university's Faculty Athletics Representative. I'm gonna ask him in this interview what that job entails. Dr. Davidson, welcome to Voices. 

John E. Davidson: Thanks very much, David. 

David Staley: And before I get to that stage, I wanted to talk about film studies and your work here.

And maybe start with, give us a definition. What is it that film studies, studies? Film, obviously. How do film scholars study film? 

John E. Davidson: Oh, goodness. You're starting with the short question. 

David Staley: The short question. Yeah. 

John E. Davidson: There'd be lots of different approaches. Mine looks at moving image productions,

works in the historical context over the course of the, largely for me, the 20th century, obviously things have changed at the end of the 20th into the 21st century a little bit. My work is really as a kind of as cultural historian through [00:02:00] the interpretation of texts, in many ways.

I do a lot of archival work to support that, mostly in Berlin, working largely in the German realm, and I would say that the impact that this medium has had, both as an art form, if one wants to call it that, and then as a commodity in our, in the circulation of our cultures particularly in, in Western Europe for me, is the basis of the study.

David Staley: So you look at film as a text? 

John E. Davidson: Yes. I started out as a comparative literary scholar and comparative textual analysis is the heart of what I do. There are approaches that look more at production histories, distribution models. I start from sort of text-based analysis.

There's a tradition in the German realm of sociological sort of exploration that started pretty early on with film, trying to figure out what was happening with audiences. Both through surveys following films early on, but also then colored by

cultural theoretical analysis from the [00:03:00] contemporary realm. 

David Staley: When you say you do archival work, what does that mean? Are you an historian? 

John E. Davidson: I look at things that have been preserved in archives, materials around film, pro filmic and pre filmic materials, advertising posters, writeups, obviously journalistic reviews,

these kind of things are all part of it. And some of the material is only available in the primary material, the films, the texts are only available in archives. There are a couple in Berlin that have been particularly useful for me that I go to. It's rare that I am discovering something, uncovering something completely

unknown in the way that a historian might, or it's a different kind of archeology, in the archive as I work on it. 

David Staley: What are some of the things that you look for when you are looking at a film or when you're reading the text that is a film? 

John E. Davidson: I guess a basic question that I ask is, why am I looking at this as a film? Why does it matter that this is a film? Why am I not just reading a script? Why am I not just looking at a plot summary? What [00:04:00] is it that film does that's different to those kinds of things? And it impacts viewers in all sorts of ways that go beyond the simple narrative, go beyond the intentions of a script writer or a production company or a big studio, and those are the kinds of possibilities that I try and ferret out and figure out. I'm not really so interested in the cognitive approach to that, I'm not really interested in

cognitive studies of film that look at why our brain processes something a particular way. That's an interesting question, but for me, in terms of understanding more about film, what that tells you less about film and its overall impact in society, it tells you how to build about mousetrap and I'm not really, that's not my job, it's more of a marketing issue. 

David Staley: Hmm. A lot of your work focuses on how film engages with history and memory. How can movies shape the way societies remember difficult or even traumatic pasts? 

John E. Davidson: Powerfully, I would say, the [00:05:00] mechanisms there are manyfold. Images that are given to us, stick, and quite often stand in for whole eras, whole complicated questions that as a historian one might look at through governmental policy and application and all sorts of things a film might tell that story in a very different way, but one that's not necessarily journalistic, it bites.

And so in my field, in German studies, film became particularly important in the question of sort of memory, Holocaust memory, World War II ,working through World War ii because there was this sense that not only could film be this place to uncover uncomfortable memories, but also obviously to mask them and replace a different kind of,

maybe a more truthful history in some ways. And so, a lot of the work when I was starting out doing film studies was involved in both trying to find those vehicles that collectively really fostered a kind of critical engagement with history and with [00:06:00] memory, and then also critically combating those that seem to work against that.

So that's the sort of realm that I really come at this from initially. 

David Staley: Give us an example of a film, a German film that was masking, say, the memory of the Holocaust. 

John E. Davidson: Let's start with a, since right now I'm working primarily in the fifties and sixties, and so I'm fascinated by that era, and in that period, the Holocaust itself wasn't really, it wasn't being masked 'cause it wasn't very much on the table at all, but the memory of the war, the potential, implications for everyday Germans following the war, that was an issue, and the war was talked about a lot.

People sometimes think about the fifties being a place where there was great silence about the war in Germany, it's not really exactly true. There were a lot of films about them, but they tended to portray Germans as victims, german soldiers as victims, right, of the bad Nazi hierarchy, of the evil general who were sadistic, right?

They, too, were victims of all of this. And.. 

David Staley: So not the Red [00:07:00] Army, not the Americans...? 

John E. Davidson: Well, also the Red Army. I mean, Dresden, the bombing in Dresden, for example, is a place where this myth of victimization got built a lot. There were less films about that specifically for a lot of reasons.

But the idea that and the fear of the Russians coming in, right in, in films that took place during the war, were set in the war. The fear of the Russians coming in was always a primary motivator in the narrative. They talked about the war, they talked about the experiences, but largely in order to put themselves in a position where, at the very worst,

war is one of those things that happens, why must humans do this to themselves, kind of question. Or, on the other hand, as, as willy, as just normal people who got caught up in the middle of the evil brainwashing Nazis and the generals and that sort of thing. 

David Staley: But, no sense of responsibility, no sense of culpability?

John E. Davidson: Some, but less in the films of the fifties. But there were some that tried to look at that. There was a film called _The Bridge_, 1959, may not, wouldn't have [00:08:00] made it over here. It tells the story of a small village in Western Germany near the end of the war

as the folk storm is being as, right, the kids are being armed, they're supposed to defend the bridges on this river to the last man, and they all but one get killed and it's this great catastrophe. But that, so this develops a certain amount of sympathies for these kids, although some of these kids were

avid Hitler Youth and really believed in the cause. As a 14-year-old, 13, 14-year-old, how much responsibility is there is another question, but it does really explore the sort of various people in the village and their relationships to the larger narratives in a way that at least complicates this notion that Germany didn't have anything to do, real Germans didn't have anything to do with it. It was all those folks over there. And so, that's one that at least tries early on to do this kind of thing. There are a number of films that are made about the assassination attempt on Hitler in July of 44. Again, they build a somewhat historic narrative, but they also, [00:09:00] the nature of that, it's a small conspiracy that's trying to kill the big monster,

and the very nature of that implies that the rest of the society is indeed part and parcel of this, in a way. And so, those are trying to work on something like that, although maybe they create more of a resistance narrative than really existed. 

David Staley: Are these themes mirrored, say, in German literature,

from the period?

John E. Davidson: Very much so, and German literature deals with this stuff more thoroughly and earlier than film does. But there are understandable reasons for that, right? Film is expensive, film generally requires ,in those days studios to make it, capital behind it,

the go ahead of the allies who occupied it, all of those sorts of things, and so that, that's that complicated in many ways what one could independently do, whereas individual authorship had more opportunity, and in particular, in sort of short prose and poetry, there was a great deal that was being done now to try and bring these experiences and this question of guilt to light.

And then in the [00:10:00] second half of the fifties, novels began doing the same thing. 

David Staley: So, your current book project explores the aesthetics of visual culture and the quote unquote "disappearance of race" after the second World War. I would like to hear more about this research.

John E. Davidson: Yeah, the audience may not see the air quotes that you put around disappearance because obviously race disappears, the term "rasse" disappears in Germany immediately following the war. Obviously one had the United Nations declaration on race, and there was a way in which there was this kind of sudden evacuation of that term.

But of course culture doesn't change that quickly, people's mindset don't change that quickly, and even in the budding new democracy, there were obviously great questions about what was going on. What's really interesting to me about this is threefold, I think. First, there is a perverse way in which the conceptualization of

West Germany itself, and Western Europe more broadly in the post-war world [00:11:00] assumes a kind of Christian whiteness that again, in a perverse way, takes the Nazi project of the Holocaust as, well, that's the ground we're now given, but they don't seem to be terribly upset about that issue,

right? So this defacto assumption that the tradition that's being reestablished, democracy is essentially white and Christian is one that's very strong. At the same time, all the debates in the parliament and elsewhere are about how we maintain relationships to the resources and the labor power

in Africa specifically. And that's a, as I'm sure you're aware, that's a different question in Germany than it is historically than it is in France or other places, having lost the colonies in 1918. Already in the twenties, in the Weimar Republic, there was a great deal of discussion about how one shifted away from a kind of colonialist model to

what some might call [00:12:00] a, a neocolonialist view or a developmental model of that world. And that was picked up then in the fifties and moved on. But it assumes that we, the Germans, the Europeans, we have a certain right or a certain need for those resources and that labor power, and we need to figure out how to get it.

So, that's a very overt conversation on the one hand, and yet on the other hand, there's this sort of evacuation of ideas about race, not just about the Jews obviously ,but about others. Second element there is the US occupation. 

There were a good number of Black GIs who were subject to segregation.

The army was a pretty brutal place at that point. We are there on the occupying democratizing mission to show the Germans how it's really done, and the Germans look and see, maybe that's not really how it's done and there are odd ways in which there was a comfort level for many of the GIs over there that they didn't have at home.

So, that's another, an [00:13:00] interesting thing, and out of that also comes a kind of, it's not a subculture, it's more sort of moments in the cultural mix, in clubs, in the insertion of jazz. So many American musicians went over to play jazz during the, those days, and a lot of the, come back to my own work,

one of the things I'm interested in is the photographic and filmic record of, and it's a troubling fascination at some levels, but it's also a genuine attempt at a kind of integration, cultural integration, embrace of the new, this kind of thing that's at work there. And I, one of the chapters in this book that you mentioned before will be about a series of photographers who, on the one hand work in highly experimental abstract veins and on the other hand spend their time in clubs

photographing jazz, listening to jazz, and bringing that out as part of the sort of culture of the day. 

David Staley: You've also recently published a piece on the work of the artist, Hans Arp. I'd like to hear, I'd like to hear a little more about this.

John E. Davidson: I had the [00:14:00] opportunity many years ago when I started as a graduate student at the University of Iowa.

Opportunity, I was forced. I didn't I didn't, I went without a scholarship, but I did manage to get a job working in the Dada archive, which is in Iowa. And so, I became interested in in Dadaism. Hans Arp, Jean Arp, was one of the original Dadaists and a fascinating figure from the early part of the century, was in Zurich during World War I, and really was part of that aesthetically revolutionary moment.

After World War II, Hans Arp becomes one of the most famous and mainstreamed artists in the world as a sculptor, as you mentioned, but he also continues to do a lot of collage work, other things, and a great deal of it relies on well, black and white distinctions really basic sort of contrasts in his work.

And so I'm interested in the way that people like Hans Arp were rediscovered, trotted out in the [00:15:00] fifties, almost as a state art, right? Abstraction of that kind, first of all, they were, the Dadaists were those who had been, they were degenerate artists under the Nazis, and so we claimed them as ours, in one way. Abstraction also became this representation of freedom in the West as opposed to the,

the unfreedom of the East in the beginning of the Cold War. 

David Staley: Are you looking at Germany specifically, or the West or New York City? 

John E. Davidson: New York City obviously plays a role here, and it's all over Europe, but there's a very particular discourse about this in Germany.

David Staley: West Germany.

John E. Davidson: In West Germany. And there's a debate in East Germany about this, right? There's a very famous one about the sort of formalism versus realism debate. The hardcore socialists then decrying, right, the sort of asocial or antisocial or anti proletarian aspects of abstraction.

There is a certain amount of escapism that's at work there as well, but this sort of claim that this, allowing this stuff to be here, allowing space for this [00:16:00] stuff indicates that we are the home of freedom, that was really the narrative all over Western Europe, and coming out of Washington.

But then, obviously the New York art scene had a great deal to do with that as well, and CIA was really involved in this. Other people have done great work on that. So I'm interested in the sort of recuperation of the Dadaists. These people who were trying to tear Europe down when they started out become the sort of bulwark in this narrative.

But there were, there are still a lot of interesting aspects to their work, and one of the things that I worked on with Hans Arp is his collaboration with a, he's a psychiatrist, but he was known mostly as a writer under Dadism, Richard Huelsenbeck. And he does a series of small volumes of poetry that Hans Arp illustrates.

And so, I'm interested in the sort of tensions, but in the black and white images that form those illustrations and then the poetry itself and the thematic things that they bring forward as a [00:17:00] place where, almost despite themselves, a kind of discourse about the new black and white world comes forward.

And it's a particularly fascinating example for

David Staley: me. 

I introduced you as the Faculty Athletics Representative. And maybe we should start, first start with the definition. What is that role? What is it that you do in this role? 

John E. Davidson: So the Faculty Athletics Representative is a position that is mandated by the NCAA,

every member institution has to have somebody who bears this title. They don't prescribe how that gets established or what it does. At OSU, it's a position that has a lot of access and a lot of input on this. So it's set up as a, as an attachment to the President's office.

I'm relieved of 50% of my duties in order to spend about 120% of my time in the doing three things largely. [00:18:00] The first is I represent OSU to a number of bodies, I'm a voting member at the NCAA. I chaired the joint governance group at the Big 10, and I'm still a voting member in that. I'm on the Board of Directors of a small hockey league.

And then, so those sorts of representative things are out there on the FAR is the third name on sort of official communication that comes back from the NCAA, it's the President, the Athletic Director, and the FAR. So that's one, one end of things. The second side is that the FAR is to advise the President and the Athletic Director about academic issues as they may impact student athletes

from a faculty perspective. The way of circumlocution that is that I'm always supposed to be the native faculty voice in the room, and as faculty we're all of one mind, and so that's very easy to do. But so, that's the other aspect at that level. And then, the final part is where I spend most of my time, and is the broader and somewhat more amorphous part of it is [00:19:00] working in support of student athlete wellbeing and compliance.

So, it's a job that is to help safeguard institutional integrity and student athlete wellbeing, really are the two sort of key, those are my two keys in all of this. 

David Staley: When you say academic issues or you bring up academic issues, what sorts of issues? 

John E. Davidson: Well, for example, it's an academic adjacent issue, our COAM process, our process for academic misconduct is one that we have a very strict procedural policy about how that is to go, which results in a lot of cases being turned in. Faculty don't, are not supposed to exercise their own judgment in this, anything that's suspected gets sent up to the central committee so that everybody is treated the same way, and that, of course that makes a certain amount of sense. It's resulted in a tremendous backlog in the system. It's slow. And so, as FAR, point out to pointed out to the provost office and talked about it with the president and obviously with the [00:20:00] AD, this kind of delay potentially has impact on student athletes that are different from regular students because student athletes need to be certified as eligible on day one of every semester. So, the first day of class and every semester we have to, and that's part of my job, we have to certify that all the people we put on lists to put on to be able to participate are eligible. If we don't know whether somebody is eligible or not, or if we've certified somebody is eligible and it turns out that six months later that a COAM decision comes down and turn, it turns out that we have been

allowing somebody to participate who hasn't, so it's a rare case, but it's the kind of thing where, while we don't want to treat student athletes differently, the circumstances there are different. So, that's one kind of thing, and so we're trying to talk about that policy and see if there might be ways to loosen it up a little bit and get rid of that backlog just a little bit.

Not for student athletes specifically, but for all students. It's just student athletes become this sort of [00:21:00] test case in a way. Student athletes have requirements for travel

that other students don't have. The university is asking them and in some cases telling them to, to travel.

This is when you will go, this is the Big 10 sets the schedule. We don't have much. We don't have any much say in that. We get the..

David Staley: And the Big 10 is bi-coastal now, so .

John E. Davidson: Exactly. And that's been a large topic, obviously recently. Our rules don't mandate that these be excused absences.

Technically they don't have to be, the rules ask that faculty make all reasonable accommodation, these kind of things. And most faculty do. Some faculty are in a position, however, where they can't the really big sort of intro level classes in a number of the disciplines, they work with a standardized unchangeable policy across all those introductory courses.

And so that's the kind of place where I, on the one hand try to make people in the administration understand what our policies mean, and for student athletes and then on the other [00:22:00] hand, try, I occasionally try to talk to individual instructors just to make sure that they understand that this most often is not a result of slackness on the student, but rather is largely beyond their control.

I don't have any power to tell anybody what to do, but I can open the conversation. I do a lot of translation work between the athletic side of the house and the academic side of the house in that regard.

David Staley: You've been in this role since 2015, which means you have seen the emergence of name, image, and likeness legislation.

What's your personal take on NIL and especially its effects, it's impact on student athletes?

John E. Davidson: Like so many things in the sports world, NIL is a good idea that's been poorly ruled out. And obviously there was a court case that, that mandated this at some point, and by the time the ink was dry on that case, parts of it were already obsolete because there had been a period in which there were no rules.

And so the thing, the market had already changed. I'm not really a [00:23:00] market oriented guy, so I don't wanna talk about that end of things very much. NIL has some positive impacts beyond the sort of obvious cutting down on what might be seen as exploitation of some athletes. It is a possibility,

for example, a lot of student athletes traditionally left OSU with debt. It's possible now that some of those athletes will not, or we certainly leave with much less. We are doing a very good job at OSU at trying to spread NIL as broadly as we can. Again, there are market forces that work there that, that dictate some of that.

But where it's been possible, we're trying to make sure that this is spread across so that, we have 36 sports teams here, I think we have something like 29 or 30 of them members of those teams have participated in the NIL thing at some level or another. So we're really doing our best to try and make sure that this isn't just, your star full back or whatever, who I don't, I guess we don't have full backs anymore.

I just didn't wanna point to anybody specifically. [00:24:00] So that's part of it. I'm, if I may digress for just a minute, one of the reasons why I got into this was that my father was a Professor and an administrator at a school years ago, and he spent a good deal of his time fighting against big time college athletics coming into his institution,

claiming that it would be the death of you, we know the argument, right, the death of the university as we know it. And I got into this and I had to say that at least in some ways, my father was wrong. The benefit for so many of the participants was so much greater than anything that he could have seen or understood

was marked to me. But it is undeniable that the university as an institution is subject to change and pressures from the current athletics world. That may be something like the nightmare vision that he and he thought about way back in the day. Athletics is not alone in putting that stress on universities, obviously.

It's just we seem to, it's a popular term [00:25:00] nowadays, but the perfect storm seems to be upon us in many ways. I hate that term, but when you think about all the assault that higher education is under, one could call it then internal pressures like trying to figure out Rev share and NIL is another one that's shaking our foundation.

David Staley: How about I add another storm to this? So, the New York Times recently covered a push, backed by Nike, no less, to let college students major in sports, right? They say students can major in music or film, why not sports? And you were cited in this article. What's your take on all this?

Should students be allowed to major in sports? 

John E. Davidson: My sense of it is that, I understand many of the arguments that are being made in favor of this. It is a very particular skillset that has to do with body knowledge in ways that are becoming more prevalent in lots of parts of the university that we study.

My problem is that the practitioners, the teachers in this [00:26:00] major, their primary goal is not necessarily education in the way that one would think of a history professor 

working on education. I must say that almost all the coaches and practitioners I know think of themselves as educators and have very good reason to do but it's still a different

mode. So there's that. We also already at our institution and at many institutions, we already have some version of this or some allied sort of major at OSU, it's called sport industry. 

It does attract a lot of student athletes. They do get some credit for having participated, but it's, it teaches them other things in relationship to their, perhaps their post

sport world. Which one doesn't necessarily assume that a major in sports would give to them. I can imagine some institutions doing this well. I personally don't think we need it at this institution, and I think that overall the pressures from the industry side of it, mitigate against it [00:27:00] being, raising the kind of academic rigor that I think we should demand of our majors.

David Staley: How did you end up as Faculty Athletics Representative? 

John E. Davidson: So I was in service at the university, I was in the Senate. I was on a number of committees. I chaired the Rules Committee for a couple of years. After that I was, I think as a reward, although I'm not entirely sure, I was named to what we call the Athletic Council here, which is a subcommittee of the University Senate that's involved in, in helping to support and to bring back information about athletics to the Senate. Ultimately reports up to the President and the board. So I was on that, there's an academic subcommittee of that I chaired. Then I chaired the council itself. I ruled off of that,

and then my predecessor retired and I was nominated for this role. I had gotten to know the athletics administration fairly well at that point. I knew and had grown to respect Gene Smith a great deal. Also there was a lot that was [00:28:00] really attractive about it. When I was nominated, I had to then apply and go through a process, but it was worth it to me in part because there's just an attraction to institutional integrity which I have and I wanted to be part of ensuring that, but also the idea that.

At OSU, if you are working in athletics, you're working with people who are just about the best at their field everywhere you turn.

And that's an exciting prospect. . And so I like doing that. I like being able to work on all parts of campus. As a humanities professor, particularly coming up at the time I did you had to fight pretty hard to get outside of the silo here and work with other people.

Interdisciplinarity, which is part of my work, isn't, wasn't necessarily fostered at the university. Now I, this position allows me to work with people all over campus that I never knew existed. And that's pretty remarkable as well.

David Staley: John E. Davidson. Thank you. 

John E. Davidson: Thank you.

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences [00:29:00] Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.