At the time of the Parallel and Life exhibition, Alloway was elected onto the ICA's Exhibitions Sub-Committee. This gave him a formal position at the ICA and moved him closer to employment there. Also in 1953 he gave two lectures in conjunction with The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head and British Painting in the Fifties exhibitions. A year later he was appointed Assistant Director—he had well and truly infiltrated the ICA. In January 1954 he had given the ICA a taste of things to come when he lectured on science fiction. A few months later he and Toni del Renzio gave a joint presentation on the Western movie genre. Although film was not a new departure for the ICA, their films had high cultural pretensions. Alloway was proposing discussing the sorts of films— movies—that the older generation at the ICA held in nothing less than contempt. Read had written about film in the 1930s and, predictably, treated it formally: “An essential film would be an abstract film, a ‘pure’ creation of light and darkness, just as an essential painting is an abstract painting.” Read even viewed the “talkies” as an unwelcome development because “The talk interrupts the continuity of the movement, or at least delays it. We begin to listen, instead of looking. But once we consciously listen in the cinema, we might as well be in the theatre.”

Referring to a proposed series of sessions on contemporary film organized by Alloway, the ICA's Bulletin for December 1954 warned that “The material will be controversial, and will not necessarily represent the views of the ICA Film Sub-Committee.” Alloway himself was quoted in the Bulletin: