Cutaways

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.

From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film's action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling-hotels, inns, and motels-to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life. Along the way, O'Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.