The Prop

Elena Gorfinkel, John David Rhodes

ISBN 10: 1531509614 / ISBN 13: 9781531509613

Published by Fordham University Press, US, 2025

About this Item

What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds. The term "prop" is short for property. This truncated term's etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material-often literal-furniture of cinema's diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epstein's account of photogénie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk's melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely-almost never-been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right. This book begins by tracing the prop's curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Analyses of scenes of "prop mastery" demonstrate the labor that props perform and enable, as well as the interpretive work they make possible. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts-studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films-The Prop introduces readers to the notion of "prop value," a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodity's subjection to exchange value. Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781531509613

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Prop
• Publisher: Fordham University Press, US
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1531509614
• ISBN 13: 9781531509613
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 12.7W x 1.02H x 17.53D centimeters 12.7 centimeters width by 1.02 centimeters height by 17.53 centimeters depth

About this title

Synopsis

What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds.

The term “prop” is short for property. This truncated term’s etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material―often literal―furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epstein’s account of photogénie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk’s melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely―almost never―been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right.

This book begins by tracing the prop’s curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Analyses of scenes of “prop mastery” demonstrate the labor that props perform and enable, as well as the interpretive work they make possible. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts―studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films―The Prop introduces readers to the notion of “prop value,” a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodity’s subjection to exchange value. Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

About the Authors

Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (Minnesota, 2017) and Wanda (British Film Institute, 2025).

John David Rhodes is Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (Minnesota, 2017), Meshes of the Afternoon (British Film Institute, 2011), and Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minnesota, 2007).