Author Bio

Brian Neve was born in Brighton, on the south coast of England. In 1948, he attended the Universities of Reading and Essex, before becoming a Research Assistant and then Temporary Lecturer at Queen Mary College, University of London. For much of his career he worked at the University of Bath, becoming a Reader there, latterly in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Affairs. He taught both film and politics, teaching and collaborating in courses on American and European film, including at the postgraduate level, and supervising and examining Masters and PhD students. He left Bath University in 2014. He has been an advisor to Amiens Film Festival (re: its Endfield retrospective), and to a Congress on the Blacklist at Complutense University, Madrid. In 2019 Neve was appointed as a Visiting Fellow at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

Brian Neve is a scholar, teacher and author. He has written extensively on American film and history, and in particular on the Hollywood Left and the blacklist. Neve has combined aesthetic, interpretative and material approaches to the film work, making the widest use of archive materials. He was awarded an AHRB Leave of Absence Award while at Bath. He has also written journal articles and book chapters which explore particular aspects or cases of film and history, and interviewed Fred Zinnemann, Abraham Polonsky, Dede Allen, Budd Schulberg and others. 

Neve also contributed a major chapter, ‘HUAC, the Blacklist and the Decline of Social Cinema’, for Peter Lev’s volume for the Cinema History Project (see below). For recent pieces see ‘A Face in the Crowd in the Trump era’, Film Criticism, Vol 44 no.1, (2020) View article and ‘Populism and Politics in Robert Penn Warren’s and Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men’, Cineaste (web exclusive), vol. XLIII, no. 2 (Spring 2018) View article.

Published essays and chapters on film history & politics

‘What happened to the Four Freedoms?’: John Huston, Richard Brooks, Humphrey Bogart and “Key Largo” (Warner Bros., 1948) as a parable of post-war liberalism’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (forthcoming, 2021).

‘A Face in the Crowd in the Trump era’. Film Criticism, Vol 44 no.1, 2020.

‘Populism and Politics in Robert Penn Warren and Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men’. Cineaste, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, 2018.

‘Our Daily Bread and the limits of thirties political imagining’, in Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies, (eds.), Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

‘Introduction: Political Hollywood’, in Yannis Tzioumakis and Clare Molloy, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

“Working-Class Noir in the Blacklist Era: The Making of Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury (1950)” Cineaste, XL, 2 (Spring 2015).

‘The Politics of Film Noir’, in Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson, eds., A Companion to Film Noir (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

‘Morality, politics and self-interest: framing the Hollywood Blacklist’, in Jacqui Miller, ed., Film and Ethics: What Would You Have Done? (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).

‘Hollywood and Politics in the 1940s and 1950s’, in Steve Neale, ed., The Classical Hollywood Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

‘”Independence” and the “Art film”: Baby Doll and After’, in Lisa Dombrowski, ed., Elia Kazan Revisited (Wesleyan University Press, 2011).

‘‘The “Picture Man”: the cinematic strife of Theodore Roosevelt’, in Iwan Morgan ed., Presidents in the Movies: American History and Politics on Screen (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

‘Cases in European Film Culture and the Hollywood Blacklist’, in Heiko Feldner, Clare Gorarra, Kevin Passmore, eds., The Lost Decade: the 1950s in European History, Politics, Society and Culture (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

‘Inflation (1943) and the blacklist: the disrupted film career of Cy Endfield’, Historical Journal of Film, Television and Radio, 30: 4 (October 2010).

‘Red Hollywood: The Case of Robert Rossen’, in Steve Neale, Frank Krutnik, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield, eds., “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

 ‘Adaptation and the Cold War: Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American’, in James M. Welsh and Peter Lev, eds., The Literature/Film Reader, Issues of Adaptation (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2007).

‘Elia Kazan’s First Testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Executive Session, 14 January 1952’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25, 2 (June 2005). 

Brian Neve, ‘HUAC, the Blacklist and the Decline of Social Cinema’, in Peter Lev, ed., Transforming the American Screen, 1950-1959 (Cinema History Project) (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2006; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003).

‘From Exile to Expatriate: Class and Genre in Joseph Losey’s Early British Films’, in Peter Wagstaff, ed., Border Crossings, Mapping Identities in Europe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004).

‘Fred Zinnemann: A Past Master of His Craft’, in Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Cineaste Interviews 2: Filmmakers on the Art and Politics of the Cinema, (Chicago: Lake View Press, 2002).

‘Frames of Presidential and Candidate Politics in American films of the 1990s’, Javnost/The Public, Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, VII, 2 (2000).

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