Meet Global Advisor, Richard Allen Ph.D.

New York, N.Y. Film scholar, Hitchcock expert, Philosopher, Writer, Professor, Dean; these are the things that make up Richard Allen. Richard Allen was born and raised in England. Richard majored in philosophy and politics as an undergraduate where he was inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein and ran the Oxford University Film Society for a time. From there he went to the University of East Anglia, England, to study film and then to UCLA in the United States to earn his Ph.D. As a film scholar, his interests were initially in film theory and the philosophy of film. After graduating he landed a job at NYU where he worked for over 25 years. Recently, he became Dean of a Digital Media Arts School in Hong Kong called the School of Creative Media. Richard is internationally renowned as a scholar of Alfred Hitchcock. More recently he has become interested in Indian Cinema and he has spent quite a lot of time India.

Dean, Prof Richard William Allen, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Photo: Lau Wai/South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The first film Richard saw on his own at the cinema was Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey when he was 11. It left a very big impression on him. At school, he joined the National Film Theater in London and was exposed to European film, especially New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders. In his generation, the moving image was still a mystery, especially for a kid who grew up without a television. He remembers being taken to see “The Charge of the Light Brigade” when he was 9 and sitting in the theater trying to figure out what exactly he was seeing. The nature of the experience was indescribable. He couldn’t believe how this movie could have been made and staged. He couldn’t make sense of it, his interest in film theory begun with the fascination. Growing up, learning to read was a struggle for Richard. For him, movies had this immense attraction for they could communicate directly in an immediate and an extremely emotionally intense way.

Richard alongside his wife, Isabelle Frank. Photo provided by Richard Allen.

Richard’s first book, Projecting Illusion (Cambridge University Press, 1997) expressed an advanced analysis of the illusion theory of representation as a basis for defending a psychoanalytic conception of spectatorship. The idea was to try and explain the immediacy of film’s communicative power. In retrospect, working on this book was hard, and when he finished writing it he didn’t even agree with his own argument. However, it was publish or perish. He couldn’t stand on principles.

Richard really learned to write when he realized that, as a colleague once told him, “All writing is rewriting”. He now enjoys writing. Richard said, “ Until you put things down on the page, you don’t fully know what you are thinking. It’s a process of thinking, a stage of thinking. Writing feels complete when the formulation of the thought is clearly crystallized. Writing is a form of thinking that takes time”. He believes in conceptual clarity. In much writing in the humanities there is too much rushed publication and there is lack of clarity, of clarity of expression, which is also a lack of clarity in thought. He believes that this is one of the reasons that the contemporary humanities is in a parlous state.

Richard in India. Photo provided by Richard Allen.

In Richard’s career, he doesn’t know if there has been one pivotal moment, but a series of moments which are associated with intellectual discoveries. The first was discovering the philosophy of film, which provided a way to think about cinema with the rigor of philosophical inquiry. The second was discovering Hitchcock’s universe and finding out for himself that Hitchcock wasn’t just an entertainer, but that his films articulated and expressed a complex view of the world and seemed to encompass the full expressive and representational power of cinema. Next was his discovery of Indian cinema. This not only changed the way he thought about popular cinema but presented both an intellectual and cultural challenge to understand and appreciate Indian Cinema, something that was both profoundly different and frequently denigrated, on its own terms.

Richard’s newest research is on the relationship between melodrama and religion. His article, “The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination,” is about how the rhetoric of Christ Passion was framed in the middle ages as an emotional response to the spectator and forms the basis of modern melodrama in stage and film. This is a new intellectual adventure beyond the cinema that he never thought he would undertake, but it takes him back to a religious upbringing whose emotional appeal perhaps he himself re-discovered, in secular form, when he started going to the cinema.

Dean, Prof Richard William Allen, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Photo: Lau Wai/South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Richard also, perhaps surprisingly, takes pleasure in University administration. He wants to be able to make things run better, which involves getting people to work together, sometimes people with very different views of things. This a time consuming process, but he finds it rewarding and he is excited about his new job, especially the opportunity to work not only with scholars but with arts and creators.

Dean, Prof Richard William Allen, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Photo: Lau Wai/South China Morning Post (SCMP).

In his spare time, Richard enjoys writing songs and performing them with his band Thaumatrope when they are in the same continent!

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