The Prop
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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.
A beautiful object in itself, Gorfinkel’s and Rhodes’ inspiring book brings to life the object in film. It gives the prop its deserved close-up and in doing so unravels a fascinating new way of looking at cinema.---Joanna Hogg, director of The Souvenir
Rigorously argued and stylistically compelling, this slender volume contains big ideas that will change the way we think about props in film.---Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown University
Philosophically minded and wonderfully playful, The Prop is study of film objects and an exploration of property relations. Gorfinkel and Rhodes explore the deep connections between props and commodities, the profit-motives of cinema, and the often-hidden labor of film production. This book teaches readers a great deal about the objects that tangibly connect the film image to the political economy that produced it. Given the élan of their writing and the wit of their critical imagination, The Prop is also just a very fun book to read.---Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt University
Ambitious, thoughtful and stimulating in its ideas, the book is also enjoyable for its open, informal approach.---Hannah McGill, Sight and Sound
. . . explores the importance of objects in movies.---Vogue
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 (Author)
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).
1. A Strand of Rope | 1
2. Reading for the Prop | 13
3. Prop Value | 32
4. Realism, or the Prop’s Thereness | 53
5. The Prop and the Performer | 80
6. Modalities of the Prop beyond the Studio | 95
Coda: Golden Rain Tree | 115
Theses on the Prop | 119
Acknowledgments | 125
Notes | 127
List of Figures | 137
Index | 139
