Steve Neale: Interrogating Cinema

By Frank Krutnik.

Renowned for his groundbreaking work on genre, Neale has also made key interventions into other areas of film and media criticism…. [He] is not afraid to challenge critical orthodoxies, but does so not in a grandstanding manner but with a persuasive equanimity that invites us to rethink taken-for-granted propositions.”

In fond memory of Steve Neale (7 May 1950–20 November 2021)

This is an abridged version of the Introduction from Film, Cinema, Genre: the Steve Neale Reader, published in January 2021 by Exeter University Press. The Reader, which I edited with Richard Maltby, collects together highlights from Neale’s productive and agenda-setting career as a critic, theorist and historian of cinema from the 1970s to the 2010s. Now that illness has forced his retirement, the editors believe this was a good time to reflect on and celebrate his legacy. They hope this Reader will serve as a fitting commemoration of a scholar who has made an unparalleled contribution to the study of cinema.

If you have even the slightest interest in film studies, you will doubtless have come across Steve Neale. Renowned for his groundbreaking work on genre, Neale has also made key interventions into other areas of film and media criticism, including studies of gender representation, cinema and technology, special effects, art cinema, independent film, politics and film, ideology and propaganda, film and psychoanalysis, film and television comedy, screen adaptation, cinema history, and formal analysis. His work is unified not so much by theme as by method. Whatever he is writing about, and whether he is working within theoretical or historical paradigms, Neale’s writing is immediately identifiable by its precision, clarity and rigour. He builds a well-reasoned argument on the foundations of painstaking and wide-ranging research, and judiciously assesses the value of existing contributions to the topic. Neale is not afraid to challenge critical orthodoxies, but does so not in a grandstanding manner but with a persuasive equanimity that invites us to rethink taken-for-granted propositions.

Steve Neale began his adventures in UK film studies in the 1970s, when pioneering individuals and institutions were laying the foundations for a serious-minded film culture that would explore cinema’s significance as an art form and as an influential modern medium. This project met with considerable resistance from cultural gatekeepers, as well as inspiring factional disputes between educationalists and critical theorists. Especially crucial to his early career were the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT), funded by the British Film Institute (BFI), and its influential journal Screen, which was launched in 1969 with a view to combining the organization’s long-standing educational remit with a commitment to a more theoretically grounded critique of cinema.[1]

SEFT built on the achievements of the BFI’s Education Department, which, under the leadership of Paddy Whannel from 1957 to 1971, developed initiatives that promoted film education and film culture.[2] These included: supporting school teachers with study materials and advice; establishing publishing ventures such as the Cinema One book series (with Secker & Warburg); and ultimately introducing higher education film studies courses by part-funding university lectureships.[3] Whannel’s policy of establishing a “debate-based film culture” provoked the ire of the BFI’s more conservative governing body.[4] Established critics, including those writing for the BFI house journal Sight and Sound, were also affronted by the Education Department’s focus on popular Hollywood cinema, which challenged canonical assumptions about value in British film culture (exemplified by the sacralization of British social realism and European art cinema).[5] The BFI governors launched a “vendetta” against Whannel and his team, insisting they restrict their activities to servicing the needs of teachers (signaled by the strategic rebranding of the unit as the Educational Advisory Service).[6] Whannel and five other members resigned in protest, but key features of the Education Department’s mission persisted, and indeed intensified, in other corners of the BFI – especially SEFT and Screen.[7]

Screen’s first editorial declared that the journal would provide a forum for debating “controversial areas relevant to the study of film and television”.[8] From January 1971 onwards, under the editorship of Sam Rohdie and then Ben Brewster, Screen certainly fulfilled such promise. Steered by British intellectuals who were energized by the activism of May 1968, the journal served up a heady brew of French-influenced theory – semiotics, structuralism, the neo-Marxism of Louis Althusser, the neo-Freudianism of Jacques Lacan – in an ambitious bid to establish a politicized film critique. Attacked in many quarters both for the theories it embraced and for the often abstruse language in which it put them across, Screen nonetheless won numerous devotees worldwide and exerted considerable influence within humanities scholarship. As Philip Rosen notes, the journal emerged as “the most powerful and widely discussed English-language platform for 1970s film theory”.[9] Numerous aspects of the ‘Screen project’ have subsequently been contested, but the 1970s articles by such writers as Colin McCabe, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Paul Willemen and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, as well as translations of essays by Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, remain key reference points within film studies.[10] The journal’s most well-known contribution, Laura Mulvey’s 1975 Screen essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, was a foundational text for feminist film theory and is the most influential and most anthologized film studies article from this era.[11]

Neale’s association with the BFI, SEFT and Screen began in the mid 1970s, following a couple of years teaching English and Film Studies at a London school. He joined the evening class run jointly by the BFI and the University of London, achieving a Diploma in Film Studies, and also secured a Postgraduate Diploma in Film Studies from the Polytechnic of Central London – another course strongly influenced by Screen theories.[12] From 1976-78 Neale worked on a part-time basis for the BFI as a lecturer and researcher. By this stage he had impressed key figures in the film theory movement and was accepted within SEFT’s ‘inner circle’, proving himself an adept advocate of its radical mission. He served on the editorial board of Screen for 13 years from 1978, and was co-editor of the second Screen Reader, which republished key articles on semiotics and cinema from the early 1970s.[13] The Steve Neale Reader includes the first two of his many articles for Screen: reviews of, respectively, the 1975 relaunch of the influential journal Movie and the 1976 book Personal Views by Movie critic Robin Wood. Wood, Victor Perkins and other Movie writers had contributed to several BFI educational initiatives in the 1960s[14] but Screen activists of the 1970s routinely invoked their work as the antithesis of robust theoretical enquiry.[15] Neale followed suit, critiquing the methods and assumptions of the Movie approach to film from the perspective of Screen’s investment in Marxism, semiology and structuralism. While acknowledging the journal’s historical significance in encouraging serious and rigorous scrutiny of Hollywood films, as well as its detailed attention to film form, Neale rebukes the Movie critics for relying on unexamined ideological and evaluative premises, and for subordinating industrial and socio-cultural determinants to the celebration of (certain kinds of) films and auteurs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Neale’s championing of the Screen project may follow the ‘party line’, but these reviews nonetheless anticipate the finely tuned scrutiny of methodology and the demand for historical contextualization that would characterize his later work.

Neale’s subsequent articles and chapters explore more distinctive areas of interest. For example, he built on Screen’s commitment to the Marxist concept of ideology to scrutinize its relationship with propaganda, as well as examining the topic of politics and documentary film in several other publications. While Neale’s work mostly focuses on Hollywood cinema, several early publications also investigate other cinematic modes and institutions. Informed by his experience as a film programmer in Bristol (1979-80) and Nottingham (1980-84), for example, he produced several articles on British independent cinema as well as the groundbreaking 1981 article “Art Cinema as Institution”. This challenged traditional approaches to post-World War 2 art cinema that prioritized the director or questions of film form, arguing instead for the need to examine the determining influence of broader economic and institutional factors such as “its sources of finance, its modes and circuits of production, distribution and exhibition, its relationship to the state, [and] the nature of the discourses used to support and promote it”.[16]

Neale made a further significant contribution to film studies with his critical scrutiny of masculinity. Despite the phenomenal popularity of Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen actually carried little feminist theory in the 1970s, when it was emerging as a pioneering mode of film critique.[17] Neale first wrote about representations of masculinity and the male body in a brief article he contributed to a 1982 Screen issue on sexual politics. Examining the much-vaunted British film Chariots of Fire (1981), he argues that its manifest treatment of class, religion, nation and male comradeship is grounded in a conservative Oedipal dynamic that operates through an array of looking relations centred on the spectacle of the male body.[18] The following year Screen published “Masculinity as Spectacle”, which offers a more extended engagement with such issues.[19] Taking its cue from the critical apparatus of feminist film theory, this much-cited article argues that while critical work on representations of both women and gay men often identify heterosexual masculinity as a structuring norm, this is rarely analyzed in depth. To rectify this omission, Neale proposes an examination of “how heterosexual masculinity is inscribed and the mechanisms, pressures and contradictions that inscription may involve”.[20] Building on, extending and complicating Mulvey’s psychoanalytic work on identification, looking and spectacle, his exploration of cinematic hetero-masculinity made an innovative contribution to studies of gender representation.

The BFI published Neale’s first book, Genre, in 1980. This compact monograph marked a significant departure from earlier genre criticism, such as Jim Kitses’ Horizon’s West (1969) and Colin McArthur’s Underworld USA (1972), both published in the Cinema One series. In promoting the idea of the Hollywood auteur-director, earlier Cahiers du Cinema and Movie critics had challenged dominant assumptions about cinematic value, but by the late 1960s auteurism had become a critical orthodoxy. Kitses and McArthur sought to complicate such assumptions but not to negate them, as both books include chapters on key directors working within the respective genres. Neale’s monograph aimed to reframe and rethink genre, returning to the conceptual questions addressed by earlier critics while exploring how the theoretical interventions of structuralism, semiotics, Althusserian Marxism and psychoanalysis, especially as they pertain to ideology, could help develop new understandings of this key feature of popular cinema.[21] Neale argues that a theory of genre needs to go beyond merely elucidating recurring themes, structures, or patterns of iconography.[22]  It should instead explore how cinema functions as a signifying practice (through its modes of address and discursive processes) and as a social practice (through its institutional operations in shaping and disseminating cultural representations), both activities coordinated through the industrial and commercial production of narrative. The various genres provide distinct ways of mobilizing the interplay of equilibrium and disequilibrium that is fundamental to the workings of narrative, with each genre establishing its own system of address and its own strategies for balancing the demands of process and stability.[23] The various genres also make distinctive uses of cinematically-codified regimes of spectacle, pleasure and verisimiltude.[24]

This ambitious and densely wrought study delivers many keen insights into cinema in general, and into Hollywood, the genre system, and individual genres. Very much a product of its time, Neale’s account navigates through the work of such 1970s Screen luminaries as Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, Roland Barthes, Paul Willemen, Laura Mulvey, and Jacques Lacan. In a move that foreshadows some of his later work, however, Neale briefly indicates the importance of two interrelated areas marginalized in the book’s largely discursive focus – the economic aspect of genre as a feature of capitalist production, and its status as a framework of expectations. Appearing at a late juncture in the study, these considerations point towards conceptual terrain beyond the orbit of the book’s theoretical concerns, operating as placeholders for future study.

Neale’s first monograph established itself as a key reference point in the generic analysis of film. It also initiated a process of critical enquiry that would occupy him for over 20 years, across a series of books, articles and chapters that scrutinized both general propositions about genre and individual genres such as the melodrama, the war film, and the romantic comedy. Neale’s work on this topic reveals a ceaseless questioning of critical assumptions, including his own, as he explores multiple facets of a system of industrial, cultural and creative production that is crucial both to popular cinema and to film studies. As this work progressed, Neale significantly modified his methodology and his critical allegiances. The 1990 Screen article “Questions of Genre”, for example, discards many of the theoretical underpinnings of his initial book to stress the productive role of industrial and journalistic discourses in determining conceptions of genre, as well as offering a more robust perspective on historical approaches to the consideration of genre and genres.

The questions raised by this article receive more extended elaboration in Neale’s book Genre and Hollywood. Returning to the terrain mapped out in his first monograph, Neale explores various critical models for understanding the definition of genres, their aesthetic and socio-cultural significance, their development through time, and their overall relationship to Hollywood’s industrial practices.[25] Existing accounts of Hollywood cinema, he suggests, are often driven by critical and theoretical agendas that rely on assumptions that lack sufficient grounding in empirical analysis.[26] Traditional generic vocabularies, he claims, are “inadequate as a means of charting Hollywood’s output and of describing many, if not most, of its films. In addition, a number of established tenets, accounts and assumptions are revealed to be misleading”.[27] He argues, instead, for approaches that combine theoretical enquiry with thorough historical research, and which can deliver “more specific, more industrially centred and more multi-dimensional forms of analysis”.[28] Coming to terms with genre, he suggests, requires examining not merely films or existing critical texts but discourses of publicity, promotion and reception – for example, in the trade or mainstream press – that feed the intertextual relay that channels generic expectations.[29]

Genre and Hollywood responds to Neale’s earlier call for critical work that examines material contexts of production and reception. Genres, he argues, are not fixed and discrete bodies of films but are processes that allow the cinema industry to generate a regulated variety of product, balancing the demands of standardization and novelty that are key to the efficient manufacture of mass-produced creative goods. Genre films are not ‘all the same’ but represent differentiated articulations and combinations of common elements.[30] Genre and Hollywood mobilizes an impressive array of detailed research into primary materials to demonstrate that the generic categories used by the entertainment trade journal Variety bear little correspondence to the canonic genre terms favoured by scholarly authorities. Drawing on the work of such industry-focussed cinema historians as Tino Balio, Thomas Schatz and Richard Maltby, Neale argues for a more flexible approach to Hollywood’s output in terms of production trends, cycles, series and hybrids.[31] The book also challenges some of the claims scholars routinely make for the exceptionalism of Hollywood’s post-studio era, illustrating that despite changes in generic fashion, 1980s production strategies exhibit numerous continuities with those of the studio era rather than representing a straightforward break with the past.[32] As usual, Neale mounts a persuasive and patiently reasoned case that is built on the foundation of painstaking research into both primary and secondary materials. His two genre monographs chart a significant move from a largely theory-driven consideration of Hollywood to one that stresses the importance of history, the cinema industry and intertextual relays. He may take issue with the deficiencies of several critical approaches, but Neale by no means advocates abandoning criticism and theory in favour of a purely empirical approach to the study of cinema. Instead, he champions scholarship that is “characterized by painstaking industrial, socio-cultural and historical research, by a thorough viewing of more than a handful of canonic films, and by a willingness to question and abandon canonic views”.[33] This is an apt description of Neale’s own work.

The development from Neale’s first monograph on genre shows the influence of the ‘return to history’ that energized film studies from the 1980s onwards, partly in reaction against the theoretical activism associated with 1970s Screen. Neale’s journey through film studies, however, illustrates the productive results that can be achieved by combining theory and history. This was apparent earlier in his career, for example in the 1985 book Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour. This was published shortly after Neale took up his first higher education appointment, at the University of Kent. In 1984 he joined fellow SEFT members Ben Brewster and Elisabeth Cowie who, along with Michael Grant, taught the university’s pioneering undergraduate film studies program, one of only a handful in the UK at this time.[34] The teaching faculty at Kent may have been strongly associated with SEFT and Screen, but its film studies provision expanded beyond this theoretical repertoire.

Few of his peers consistently produced such an impressive array of agenda-setting work, nor have they demonstrated a comparable agility in countering the shortcomings of critical fashion.”

Neale spent 12 years at Kent before taking positions at two contrasting institutions: Sheffield Hallam University (formerly Sheffield Polytechnic), from 1997 to 2003, and the University of Exeter from 2004 until his retirement in 2014. Despite the ever increasing teaching and administrative pressures of the modern university, Neale maintained a prodigious output of scrupulously researched and innovative publications. These included co-authored monographs on film and television comedy (1990, with Frank Krutnik) and on the history of Hollywood’s big-budget spectaculars (2010, with Sheldon Hall), edited collections on contemporary Hollywood (1998, with Murray Smith), on the Hollywood blacklist (with Frank Krutnik, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield). on widescreen cinema (2010, with John Belton and Sheldon Hall), and on the classical Hollywood film industry (2012), as well as numerous articles and chapters. One intriguing feature of his later work is that having moved from a predominantly theoretical to a largely historical methodology, Neale focussed increasingly on close formal analysis – including detailed accounts of such films as Chinatown (1974), Rio Bravo (1959), Human Desire (1954), Lust for Life (1956), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and The Best Years of our Lives (1946). In a sense, he returned to the critical terrain associated with Movie in the early 1960s, but without the evaluative presuppositions of that journal’s contributors. Formal analysis played a key role in Neale’s teaching from the early days, as well as featuring as a component in several articles and chapters. Several of his publications in the past twenty years, however, deal more precisely with compositional strategies, the role of gesture, the textual patterning of image and sound motifs, and narrational practices. Through rigorous attention to such details, Neale aims not to present ‘definitive’ interpretive judgements but to highlight the aesthetic processes set in play by certain films and filmmakers – and, as a corollary, to suggest the subtle and suggestive means by which such films enlist us as participants.

Steve Neale published two further books after he retired: an edited collection of critical essays on silent films, and a monograph exploring the adaptation of stage works to the Hollywood screen. Illness may have brought a premature end to his activities as a researcher, but Neale’s work will continue to influence successive generations of teachers, scholars and students. Neale was a committed scholar and teacher who was motivated by a genuine quest for knowledge rather than personal advancement. He was part of a groundbreaking generation of intellectuals who were not only fascinated by cinema, but who were also able to translate cinephilia into a grand project of critical inquiry. Neale’s achievements were undoubtedly facilitated by the fact that he entered film studies at an early stage in its UK career, when there was a sense of boundless possibility in the new conceptual terrain that could be explored, and a sense, too, of the importance of film as a medium that could challenge the established evaluative standards of Britain’s hidebound culture. This generation also played a significant role in enabling film studies to reach maturity as a respected and cutting-edge university discipline. But few of his peers consistently produced such an impressive array of agenda-setting work, nor have they demonstrated a comparable agility in countering the shortcomings of critical fashion. Moreover, those who have had the privilege of working with him, like the editors of this Reader, can readily testify not merely to the quality and significance of Steve Neale’s research but also to his personal qualities – his integrity, his modesty, and his generosity of spirit. Over and above his remarkable achievements, sampled within the Reader, we value him as a colleague, a collaborator, a personal inspiration, and a friend.

Notes

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[1] Manuel Alvarado, Edward Buscombe and Richard Collins “Introduction”, in Alvarado, Buscombe and Collins (eds.), The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture, London: Macmillan, 1993, 1-2.

[2] Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, “From Cinephilia to Film Studies”, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds.), Inventing Film Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 217; Alan Lovell, “The BFI and Film Education”, Screen 12.3 (Autumn 1971), 17.

[3] Colin McArthur: “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute”, Journal of Popular British Cinema 4 (2001), 115-117.

[4] See McArthur, “Two Steps Forward”, 114, 124; and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “The 1970 Crisis at the BFI and its Aftermath”, Screen 47.4 (Winter 2006), 458.

[5] See, for example, Alan Lovell, “Notes on British Film Culture”, Screen 13.2 (Summer 1972), 7.

[6] See: Terry Bolas, Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies, Bristol: Intellect, 2009, 185-6; McArthur, “Two Steps Forward”, 116; and Alan Lovell, “The BFI and Film Education”, Screen 12.3 (Autumn 1971).

[7] Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “The British Film Institute”, Cinema Journal 47.4 (Summer 2008), 128.

[8] Qtd. Bolas, 169. See also: Bolas 218-9.

[9] Philip Rosen, “Screen and 1970s Film Theory”, in Grieveson and Wasson (eds.), 265.

[10] Notable attacks on Screen theory came from Andrew Britton (“The Ideology of Screen”, Movie 26 (Winter 1978-79), 2-28) and David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Influence and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 87-94.

[11] Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”, Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975), 6–18.

[12] Vincent Porter, “Film Education during the 1970s”, in Sue Harper and Justin Smith (eds.), British Film Culture in the 1970s, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 71-2.

[13] Mick Eaton and Steve Neale (eds.), Screen Reader 2: Cinema and Semiotics, London: SEFT, 1982.

[14] Bolas, 154.

[15] See, for example, Sam Rohdie, “Review: Movie Reader, Film as Film”, Screen 13.4 (Winter 1972), 135-45. Perkins offered a spirited response to Rohdie’s attack on his book Film as Film in the same issue (“A Reply to Sam Rohdie”, Screen 13.4 (Winter 1972), 146-51. See also Bolas, 171.

[16] Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution”, Screen 22.1 (May 1981), 13.

[17] Bolas, 279, and Annette Kuhn, “Screen and screen theorizing today”, Screen 50.1 (Spring 2009), 4. In 1973 SEFT did, however, publish another foundational text of feminist film theory, Claire Johnston’s essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema”, in the Screen pamphlet Notes on Women’s Cinema, edited by Johnston (London: SEFT, 24-31).

[18] Steve Neale, “Chariots of Fire: Images of Men”, Screen 23.3-4 (Autumn 1982), 47-53.

[19] Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle”, Screen 24.6 (Winter 1983), 2-17.

[20] Ibid., 4.

[21] Steve Neale, Genre, London : BFI, 1980, 5.

[22] Ibid., 7-17.

[23] Ibid., 25-26.

[24] Ibid., 34-45.

[25] Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge, 2000, 4-5.

[26] Ibid., 1. This is especially the case, he argues, with film noir and melodrama.

[27] Ibid., 4-5.

[28] Ibid., 4.

[29] Ibid., 2-3.

[30] Ibid., 231-2.

[31] Ibid., 236-8.

[32] Neale follows a similar line of argument in his 2003 chapter “Hollywood Blockbusters: Historical Dimensions”, included in this Reader.

[33] Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 253-4.

[34] Cowie replaced John Ellis, another key member of SEFT.

Frank Krutnik is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), Popular Film and Television Comedy (with Steve Neale, 1990) and Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000), and editor of Hollywood Comedians: the Film Reader (2003), Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (with Steve Neale, Brian Neve, Peter Stanfield, 2003) as well as special issues of New Review of Film and Television Studies and Film Studies.

Richard Maltby is the Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he has published extensively on the cultural history of Hollywood and edited eight books on the history of cinema audiences, exhibition and reception, including Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (UEP, 2007; co-edited with Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen). He is a Series Editor for Exeter Studies in Film History.

Steve Neale – Selective Bibliography

Books

**Genre, BFI, 1980

**Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour, Macmillan, 1985

Popular Film and Television Comedy, co-authored with Frank Krutnik, Routledge, 1990

**Genre and Hollywood, Routledge, 2000

Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History, co-authored with Sheldon Hall, Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2010

Screening the Stage: Case Studies of Film Adaptations of Stage Plays and Musicals in the Classical Hollywood Era, 1914-1956, Herts: John Libbey, 2017

Edited Books

Screen Reader 2: Cinema & Semiotics, with Mick Eaton SEFT, 1981

Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, BFI, 2002

Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, with Murray Smith, Routledge 1998

‘‘Un-American’’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era’, with Frank Krutnik, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008

Widescreen Cinema Worldwide, with John Belton and Sheldon Hall, New Barnet, U.K.: John Libbey Press. 2010

The Classical Hollywood Reader, London: Routledge, 2012

Silent Features. Essays on Silent Feature-Length Films 1914-1934.  Exeter: University of Exeter Press 2018

Contributions to edited books

‘Issues of Difference: Alien and Blade Runner’, in James Donald (ed), Fantasy and the Cinema, BFI, 1989

‘“You’ve Got to be Fucking Kidding!”, Knowledge, Belief and Judgement in Science Fiction’, in Annette Kuhn (ed), Alien Zone, Verso, 1990

‘Vanishing Americans: Racial and Ethnic Issues in the Interpretation and Context of Post-war “Pro-Indian” Westerns’, in Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western, BFI, 1998

‘Widescreen Composition in the Age of Television’, in Neale and Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Routledge 1998

‘Westerns and Gangster Films’, in Steve Neale (ed), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, BFI, 2002

‘Hollywood Blockbusters: Historical Perspectives’, in Julian Stringer (ed), Movie Blockbusters, Routledge, 2003

‘Action-Adventure as Hollywood Genre’, in Yvonne Tasker (ed), Action and Adventure Cinema, Routledge, 2004

‘Narration, Point of View and Patterns in the Soundtrack of Letter from an Unknown Woman’, in John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (eds), Style and Meaning: Essays in the Detailed Analysis of Film, Manchester University Press, 2005.

‘Chinatown and 1970s Hollywood Cinema’, in Jeffrey Geiger and R.L.Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, WW Norton, 2005

‘Transatlantic Ventures and Robin Hood’, in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years, Open University Press, 2005

‘War films’, in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, ed. J David Slocum, New York: London: Routledge, 2006

‘Adventure, Exchange and Identity: British, American and Un-American Involvement in Costume Adventure Films and TV Series in the Postwar Era’, in Sylvia Harvey (ed), Trading Cultures, John Libbey Press, 2006

‘‘‘The Last Good Time We Ever Had?’’: Revising the Hollywood Renaissance’, in Contemporary American Cinema, ed. Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond, London: Boston: Open University Press, 2006

‘Swashbuckling, Sapphire and Salt: Un-American Contributions to TV Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s’, in ‘‘Un-American’’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era’, eds Frank Krutnick, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008

‘Introduction’, with Frank Krutnik, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, in ‘‘Un-American’’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era’, eds Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008

** ‘“I Can’t Tell Anymore Whether You’re Lying”: Double Indemnity, Human Desire and the Narratology of Femmes Fatales’, in The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, ed. Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe, ‘Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

‘The Properties of Images: Lust for Life (1956)’, in Film Moments: Critical Methods and Approaches, ed. James Walters; Tom Brown; London: BFI, 2010

** ‘The Art of the Palpable: Composition and Staging in the Widescreen Films of Anthony Mann’, in Widescreen Worldwide, ed. John Belton, Sheldon Hall and Stephen Neale; New Barnet, U.K.: John Libbey: 2010

‘Introduction’, ‘Arties and Imports, Exports and Runaways, Adult Films and Exploitation’, and ‘Epilogue’, in The Classical Hollywood Reader, ed Steve Neale, London: Routledge, 2012

** ‘Hollywood Blockbusters: Historical Dimensions’, in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer, London: Taylor and Francis 2013

** ‘Gestures, Movements and Actions in Rio Bravo’, in Howard Hawks: New Perspectives, ed. ‘Ian Brookes, London: Palgrave on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2016

‘Introduction 2: The Long Take—Concepts, Practices, Technologies, and Histories’, in The Long Take, J. Gibbs and D. Pye (eds.), London: Palgrave, 2017

Journal Articles

** ‘The Reappearance of Movie’, Screen, vol 16 no 3, 1975

** “Personal Views”, Screen, vol 17 no 3, 1976

‘Sam Peckinpah, Robert Ardrey and the Notion of Ideology’, Film Form, vol 1 no 1, 1976

‘Propaganda’, Screen, vol 18 no 3, 1977

‘Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle’, Screen, vol 20 no 1, 1979

‘The Same Old Story: Stereotypes and Difference’, Screen Education, vol 32 no 3, 1979/80

‘Hollywood Strikes Back – Special Effects in Recent Hollywood Movies’, Screen, vol 21 no 3, 1980

‘Oppositional Exhibition’, Screen, vol 21 no 3, 1980

** ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, vol 22 no 1, 1981

‘Halloween: Suspense, Aggression and the Look’, Framework, no 14, 1981

‘Presentation: Dossier on Escape Route to Marseilles’, Framework, no 18, 1981

‘Linderidge 137’, Screen, vol 22 no 3, 1981

‘Psychoanalysis and Comedy’, Screen, vol 22 no 3, 1981

‘Re-viewing Welles’, Screen, vol 23 no 1, 1982

‘Authors and Genres’, Screen, vol 23 no 2, 1982

‘Chariots of Fire: Images of Men’, Screen, vol 23 no 3/4, 1982

‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, Framework, no 19, 1982

** ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, Screen, vol 24 no 6, 1983

** ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen, vol 27 no 6, 1986

‘Sexual Difference and Cinema’, Oxford Literary Review, vol 8 no 1/2, 1986

‘Questions of Genre’, Screen, vol 31 no 1, 1990

** ‘Aspects of Ideology and Narrative Form in the American War Film’, Screen, vol 32 no 1, 1991

‘The Big Romance or Something Wild?: Romantic Comedy Today’, Screen, vol 33 no 3, 1992

** ‘Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term ‘Melodrama’ in the American Trade Press’, The Velvet Light Trap, no 32, 1993

‘“The Story of Custer in Everything But Name?”: Colonel Thursday and Fort Apache’, Journal of Film and Video, vol 47 nos 1-3, 1995

‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: ‘”Un-American” Contributions to Television Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol 23 no 3, 2003

‘Swashbucklers and Sitcoms, Cowboys and Crime, Nurses, Just Men and Defenders’, Film Studies, no. 7 (special issue on the Hollywood Left edited by Steve Neale and Peter Stanfield), 2005.

‘Revisiting Waterloo Bridge: Censorship, Representation, Adaptation and the Persisting Myth of ‘Pre-Code’ Hollywood’, Film Studies, Volume 12 (Spring 2015)

‘Black Extras in The Best Years of Our Lives’, Movie. Issue 6, (December 2015), 76-85

** Included or extracted in Film, Cinema, Genre: the Steve Neale Reader, Richard Maltby and Frank Krutnik (eds.), Exeter University Press (2021).