Neil Archer

Biography

Biography

I previously taught Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, after completing an MA in World Cinemas at the University of Leeds, and a PhD in French cinema at the University of Cambridge. I joined Keele as Lecturer in Film in 2013, and became Senior Lecturer in 2019.

 

Research and scholarship

Research and scholarship

I have published widely on late twentieth- and twenty-first-century film aesthetics and the history of film industries, with a particular focus on popular British and other European cinemas, Hollywood cinema, and sport and mobility in film. My work has appeared in journals such as JCMS: Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, Studies in European Cinema, Journal of British Cinema and Television and Mobilities.

I am the author of nine monographs, including Sport, Film, and the Modern World (Peter Lang, 2024), The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 (Routledge, 2022), Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film (Bloomsbury, 2020) The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Wallflower, 2016), The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (Berghahn 2013) and Twenty-First-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (Wallflower, 2019). Beyond a Joke: Parody in English Film and Television Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2017), was nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book of 2017, and shortlisted for the BAFTSS Best Monograph Award in 2018. 

Teaching

Teaching

Module which I lead, or on which I teach, include:

• Reading Film
• Film Animation: History and Theory
• Hollywood and Beyond: Global Popular Cinemas
• Science Fiction Cinema
• Screenwriting: Principles and Practices
• Approaches to Screenwriting

Further information

Further information

I have successfully supervised four PhDs to date, respectively, on Derek Jarman’s cinema (Dr William Davies), on the labour and politics of ‘girlhood’ in recent film and television (Dr Wallis Seaton), on the politics of cosplay (Dr Daniel Skentelbery) and adaptations of Dickens’ novels (Dr Holly Kelsall). I can offer supervisory experience on the following topics:

• Sport and film
• Hollywood cinema
• British popular cinema
• Parody in film and television
• Contemporary European genre film
• The Road Movie
• Adaptation

Publications

Publications

Books

Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (London and New York: Wallflower, 2019).

Beyond a Joke: Parody in English Film and Television Comedy (I.B. Tauris, 2017).                                              

The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2016).

Hot Fuzz (Auteur, 2015).

The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (Berghahn, 2013).

The Bourne Ultimatum (Auteur, 2012).

Adaptation: Studies in French and Francophone Culture, co-edited with Andreea Weisl-Shaw (Peter Lang, 2011).

Sport, Film, and the Modern World (Peter Lang, 2024)

The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 (Routledge, 2022).

Journal Articles

‘The Paradox of Steve Coogan: Performing Class in British Film Acting’, Journal of Film and Video 75.2 (2023), 18-29.

‘Don’t believe in miracles: the British sports film in the era of sporting rationalization,’ Sport in Society 26.8 (2023), 1340-1354.

‘But What Has Footlights Ever Done for Us? Gender, Comedy and the Politics of Privilege’. Comedy Studies, 2021, DOI: 10.1080/2040610X.2021.1951104

‘Ken Loach and the Comedians: The Politics of “Acting”’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 18.3 (2021), 280–302.

French Connection UK: The Dinard Film Festival and the Politics of Culture, Studies in European Cinema, 2021. doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2021.1886454

‘UEFA at the Movies: Producing Space in the 21st Century Football Film’, Sport in Society, 2020. doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2020.1825381

‘The Europeanness of British Cinema: Considering “National” Cinemas from a Continental Perspective', Europe Now, June (2020).

‘Transnational Science Fiction at the End of the World: Consensus, Conflict, and the Politics of Climate Change’, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58.3 (2019), 1-25.

‘Genre on the Road: The Road Movie as Automobilities Research’, Mobilities 12.4 (2017), 509-519.

‘Gone Girl (2012/2014) and the Uses of Culture’, Literature/Film Quarterly 45.3 (2017)

'Fan du cinema: Imitation, Europe and The Trip to Italy (2014)', Studies in European Cinema 13.3 (2016), 246-259.

‘Speeds of Sound: On Fast Talking in Slow Movies’, Cinema Journal 55.2 (2016), 130-135.

‘“The shit just got real”: Parody and National Film Culture in The Strike and Hot Fuzz’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 13.1 (2016), 42-60.

‘A Novel Experience in Crime Narrative: Watching and Reading The Killing’, Adaptation 7.2 (2014), 212-227.

‘And then as farce: Globalization and ambivalence in Jo Nesbø and Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters (2011)’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 11.1 (2013), 55-70.

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009/2011) and the New “European Cinema”’, Film Criticism 37.2 (2013) 1-20.

‘The City Presented to Itself: Perspective, Performance and the Anxiety of Authenticity in Recent Parisian Films’, Studies in European Cinema 8.1 (2011), 31-42.

‘The Rhetoric of the Transnational: Interpretation and Identity in Géla and Temur Babluani's L'Héritage/Legacy (2006)’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 8.1 (2010), 3-14.

‘Virtual Poaching and Altered Space: Reading Parkour in French Visual Culture’, Modern and Contemporary France 18.1 (2010), 93-107.

‘Baise-moi: The Art of Going Too Far’, E-pisteme 2.1 (2009)

‘Sex, the City and the Cinematic: The Possibility of Female Spectatorship in Claire Denis's Vendredi Soir’, French Forum, 33.1-2 (2008), 245-260.

[Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 286 (Gale, 2010)].

‘The Road as the (Non-)Place of Masculinity: L'Emploi du temps’, Studies in French Cinema, 8.2 (2008), 137-148.

Book Chapters

‘Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile Gaze’, in Mobilities, Literature, Culture, eds. Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 281-306.

‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Precarious Romanticism and the English Road Movie’, in The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys Around the World, ed. Tim Corrigan and José Duarte (Bristol: Intellect, 2018), 203-218.

‘Paris je t’aime (plus): Europhobia as European-ness in Pierre Morel and Luc Besson’s “Dystopia Trilogy”’, in The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning and Globalisation, ed. Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 185-198.

‘Jamón, Jamón’, ‘10’, ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Films, ed. Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014).

‘Beyond Anti-Americanism, Beyond Eurocentrism: Locating Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms in the Context of European Extremism’, in The New Extremism in Cinema: from France to Europe, ed. Tina Kendall and Tanya Horeck (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 55-65.

‘Attack of the Clones: Watching Stars Playing Stars in French Biopics’, in Adaptation: Studies in French and Francophone Culture, ed. Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw (Peter Lang, 2011), 163-175.

Book Reviews

David Forrest and Beth Johnson (eds.), Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain, Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone (2018) http://www.cercles.com/review/r83/Forrest.html

Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke, in Studies in European Cinema, 10.2-3 (2013).