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The Prop

By (author) Elena Gorfinkel, By (author) John David Rhodes

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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 â€œpropâ€ is short for property. This truncated termâ€™s etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the materialâ€”often literalâ€”furniture of cinemaâ€™s diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epsteinâ€™s account of photogÃ©nie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-Ã -brac of Sirkâ€™s melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scÃ¨ne. And yet, the prop has rarelyâ€”almost neverâ€”been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right. This book begins by tracing the propâ€™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 â€œprop masteryâ€ 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 contextsâ€”studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde filmsâ€”The Prop introduces readers to the notion of â€œprop value,â€ a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodityâ€™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.

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