"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

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.

From the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk's melodramas to the crystal egg ofRisky Business, props are the material furniture of cinema's diegetic reality: both narrative agents and the stuff of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely been taken as an object of analysis 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. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts--studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films--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.

Elena Gorfinkelis Reader in Film Studies at King's College London.

John David Rhodesis Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge.