Fellow and Warden of Leckhampton Professor JD Rhodes has written a new book (with Elena Gorfinkel) which takes a look at an unexplored feature in film theory - props, the portable objects used on the set of a movie. 

The Prop will be published on 4 March 2025 by Fordham University Press as part of its Cutaways series of books on film aesthetics and imagination. The authors will introduce the book to Corpus members at the Stephen Hales Lecture at Leckhampton on 11 March. They will also give a ScreenTalk at the Barbican Centre in London with film director and screenwriter Joanna Hogg on Thursday 13 March featuring Douglas Sirk's melodrama, There's Always Tomorrow (1956 USA, dir Douglas Sirk), in which the domestic items used as props become more than mere set dressing.

Hogg's latest film was, in fact, inspired by reading an early draft of The Prop. Autobiografia di una Borsetta (Autobiography of a Handbag) tells the story of a leather bag made by the Italian high fashion brand MuiMui. The firm commissioned the film as part of its short-film series Women's Tales, which invites female directors to investigate vanity and femininity in the 21st century.

The publisher of The Prop writes:

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.

"It’s a really interesting book about how we see objects,” says Hogg in the Financial Times. “It goes from Douglas Sirk and the objects in his films to, you know, the way Bresson uses the prop… And then I thought, well, OK, what are the props in fashion? And obviously the handbag is one. I find handbags very appealing anyway – they are wonderful because they tend to change hands."

-Joanna Hogg

Autobiographia di una Borsetta can be viewed on the MuiMui website.

JD Rhodes is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics 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).

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