2024/01/01 by Chris O’Rourke · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Cinema and Media Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/screen/hjae025
This essay examines the film career of Robert Allen (1914-98), a transgender man who worked behind the scenes as a production secretary and an assistant director in the British film industry in the 1940s, during and immediately after World War II. 1 In that brief time, Allen worked on several high-profile productions, including major feature films and government-sponsored propaganda efforts.This period also coincided with Allen's social transition to Robert, and his successful attempt to have his masculine identity legally recognized.After his film career ended, Allen had several further encounters with the media in the 1950s, first with the newspaper serialization of his autobiography, and again when his third marriage (his second to a woman) was picked up as a human interest story by the tabloid press.If Allen had not chosen to publish his life story, the details of his time working in the film industry would most likely remain obscure.Despite having an impressive filmography, his name never appeared on screen, and he is not mentioned in the memoirs or biographies of the more wellknown people he worked with.In many respects Allen is an example of what Monica Dall'Asta describes as the 'more or less ordinary professional figures' of film history, whose labour, although vital, was largely uncredited and whose contributions have continued to be neglected or marginalized in subsequent discussions. 2As a trans man, though, Allen's circumstances mark him out as less ordinary, in fact unusual, in the context of film historiography.