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Dr Mike Allen

Positions held:
  • Senior Lecturer, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Mike Allen became part of the teaching team on the British Film Institute/Birkbeck College MA in Film and Television programme when he became Research Officer at the BFI in 1996.

    His research for the BFI involved the development of interactive multimedia programmes to aid the study of film and television.

    Subsequently, in 1999, when the MA programme moved fully to Birkbeck to help form the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, he was appointed as Lecturer in Film, Television and Electronic Media.

    Prior to this, he had also taught Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, Royal Holloway College and University of North London. In a previous incarnation in the 1980s, he was a manager at Rank Video, Europe's largest video production and duplication company.

    Mike's PhD was an examination of the narrative and formal structures of the feature films of the great early American film director D.W. Griffith. In recent years, however, his research focus has been on the history and cultural impact of media technologies.

    Mike is also a member of the Editorial Board for SCOPE online journal of film studies and has been a contributor to BBC Radio programmes on film

    Administrative responsibilities

    • Programme Director, MA in Film and Screen Media

    ORCID

    0000-0002-3029-0809
  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    The History of Media Technologies,

    Early American and British Cinema, Modern American Cinema


    Post-WWII British Film and Television

    Contemporary American Film and Television

    Digital Culture and Interactive Media

    Representations of the Cold War and the Space Age.

    Early Modern Media in India

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    4

    I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of research interest

    Current doctoral researchers

    • RUSSELL BANFIELD
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      'Starring' Sterling Hayden and Angie Dickinson: Approaching Star Studies Through Found Footage Remix Practice
      Description:

      My practice-led research project makes an original contribution to the academic field of star studies primarily through the creation of two short found footage films focusing on two minor Hollywood stars, Sterling Hayden and Angie Dickinson, who have been neglected in scholarly work. Through the close focus on, and re-use of, footage of Hayden and Dickinson, my creative-critical research has resulted in a range of insights about stardom, cinephilia, genre and gender. I discuss these insights as well as my methods in a written exegesis which attempts to articulate the specific interaction at play in my work between practice and theory, and further reflect on the value of contributing to star studies through found footage practice.

      Central to found footage filmmaking is the relationship between filmmaker, or in my case the research practitioner, and the footage used. This inevitably personal aspect means that my project is informed not only by “film history,” but also by my film history, by my memories of the films and actors I appropriate in the processes of my research. My two short found footage films, The Drowned Man (on Hayden, 17 mins) and The Woman in the Yellow Dress (on Dickinson, 20 mins), are inspired, then, by the kinds of subjective experiences that Paul Willemen called “cinephiliac moments,” a concept accounting for the fetishistic relation between viewer, in this case me, and specific moments in film. Through such moments, in my films, I construct two imagined narratives about Hayden and Dickinson, collecting footage of each actor from numerous screen performances, and editing these sequences together using methods familiar to film analysis – matching plot, costume, location, gesture. Both narratives are pastiches – of film noir and the TV movie, respectively – that call into question the conventions and representations of Hollywood narratives, the representation of masculinity and the role of women, through critical interventions of juxtaposition, détournement, and compilation. What emerges out of these practices, which I contextualise and explore in the written exegesis, is both a commentary on Hayden and Dickinson within the context of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, and a personal reflection on cinephilia and masculinity.

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • KELLI WESTON
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      The Other Women: Black Women as the Double in Female Gothic Cinema
      Awarded:
      2022
    • DAVID COTTIS
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      The Well-Made Screenplay: A Study of the Screenwriting of British Stage Playwrights, 1930-1956, with special reference to the work of R.C. Sherriff
      Awarded:
      2020
    • MARA ARTS
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      The Representation of London Nights in British Popular Press and Film, 1919-1939
      Awarded:
      2020