The Prop, by Prof JD Rhodes (MMLL, University of Cambridge) and Dr Elena Gorfinkel (Film Studies, King’s College London), was published by Fordham Press on 4 March. The Financial Times spoke to Prof Rhodes in February about Joanna Hogg’s film Autobiografia di una Borsetta, which was inspired by Rhodes’ and Gorfinkel’s book.

We asked Prof Rhodes to explain where The Prop sits in his research agenda and what it can explain about the world of cinema production. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your books have gone from the city [Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007)] to the house [Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (2017)] to the prop. Are we going to get any smaller?

I’m actually scaling back up – my next book is about Rome, so I’m going back to the beginning of my career. But the prop actually is, funnily enough, lurking. One of the first instances of using that term in my own work was in thinking about fascism and its instrumentalisation of objects, so they’re connected in a way. So yes, I’ve been scaling down – but actually as a way of getting to a broader theoretical plane. I’m going to scale back up in the next book, but in a much more located space, which is just Rome.

This book talks about critiques of property and there’s this intriguing term – ‘prop value’.

That is a playfully proposed term that would take its place alongside the familiar Marxist theoretical categories of use value and exchange value, and also just the question of value itself. We were trying to think about the way that many props are commodities: either they’ve been purchased from the world of pre-existing commodities or they’ve been produced for the film, by labour, and therefore they definitely have a use value in the production – but afterwards they’re sort of used up. Although their life could be extended on an auction market or a secondary market or something.

Value is always a fiction in some ways, or a mediation of things, and [props] somehow seemed not really to fit inside a category of absolute exchange value or absolute use value, so we playfully proposed this category of prop value, which is always dancing around those categories. I think the prop in some way can’t be thought outside of, or away from, the commodity, but it doesn’t necessarily obey the typical patterns of behaviour that the commodity does.

Were there any particular films that you were thinking of?

In that chapter we talk a lot about this Minelli film called The Bad and the Beautiful. It’s a meta-film that’s sort of about Hollywood film production, and there’s this hilarious moment where this woman, who’s the wife of the screenwriter, is overawed by the prop department, and she says, “Oh my goodness, I’ve never seen such silver” – she’s looking at the table that’s been set – “not even in Richmond.” And you’re like, well, wait, why is silverware, why is flatware, so interesting? It is just silverware that has obviously been purchased by the property department to be used and re-used in film productions – that’s all of course inside the fictional world of the film – and then those props themselves probably were just parts of that studio’s property department that are doing double duty, pretending to be the props that they really are. We were trying to get at that strange, stupefied reaction to what is just a commodity in some way, but there’s something about the commodity’s lamination inside the film’s surface that produces this extra frisson of excitement, or fetishism.

Do you think of props as in the same category as houses?

Well, they’re maybe the smallest discrete units of domestic ownership. I think the book, while it’s about film, maybe also asks us to think about the curation of our own object-worlds and how they mediate or symbolise our own unconfessed investments in private property and ownership. And I think that’s even true in, say, rented accommodations, where the way in which you possess something that doesn’t belong to you is to decorate it, or to install your belongings in it in a way that seems to symbolise either a way of life, a style of living, or a particular attitude towards ownership. It’s a kind of pseudo-ownership, in a way.

But then all of that belies the fundamental condition of property, which I talk about in my book that I published in 2017, which is that – in this I’m borrowing someone else’s phrase – for property to be property, it has to be alienable. I think property is always an anxious category, because it could not belong to you. It’s like being alive: you could also be dead. So owning something means you might not own it. Also, we of course know that other living beings have been owned, and continue to be, and so it’s a terrifying category as well, and probably one of the most dominating modalities of human existence – the question of ownership, private ownership.

And then, as you said, when you put that on film it becomes encased in this extra layer of spectacle.

It’s encased and spectacularised, but also I think the spectacularisation is always anxious, and more informative than it might want to be, if you but look at it from that sort of perspective.

Is theatre a different environment for property?

I think so. We borrowed a bit from the important work that’s been done on the props in theatre. There’s a really good book by a guy named Andrew Sofer that’s called The Stage Life of Props. I guess for us there’s this ontological condition of film, which is that you can’t touch or have anything that’s on the screen. So in terms of the possessiveness that props often incite – you could, if you wanted to, race onto the stage and grab something – the film, like the prop, kind of says, ‘Look, but don’t touch.’

Also, I think there’s something different in a lot of film production in terms of scale: just the sheer amassing and enumeration of props that film can afford itself, or that a particular type of film can afford itself. Not everything can be dragged onto stage, but the camera can be dragged to face anything and everything. And in that sense, there’s a greater degree, or risk, of instrumentality in the interface between the camera and the world. We make the playful, provocative suggestion that the world is the film’s prop. If there’s a chair in a park, it’s just minding its own business, being a chair. But if you really wanted to set a film there, that chair would suddenly be converted into having a double life that’s doubly instrumental or it’s doubly heteronomous, in which it not only exists so as to support a human bottom but it also has to support the representation of that sitting. That, I think, puts you in a different category, mediatically, from theatre. Cinema learns from theatre and it absorbs all the lessons that theatre has taught itself about props, and I think it magnifies them.

I’m trying to think about the differences between this and use value and exchange value, because some film props do have an incredible exchange value.

Yeah, they do, all the time. I mean, some directors – apparently Spielberg repurchased the whip from Indiana Jones on the auction market. But there we’re interested in the mystification of the increase in value, because it’s obviously not useful as a whip. There’s no market that I know of in, let’s say, three-dimensional real-world artefacts that have been represented in painting. Now, you could imagine that might be the case; if they weren’t housed in the Casa Morandi in Bologna, maybe the little pots and cups that he painted obsessively over and over could fetch a high price at auction. The cinematic prop’s exchange value would be predicated on almost a kind of religious fascination that we would associate with the relic, maybe, which has been touched by a holy person. This is like the ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, for instance.

I would say in many cases, [props] bend back and obey the law of the commodity. But I think in other cases there’s a bit of an escape – it doesn’t mean that they escape from the larger project and condition of capital, but we were just interested in seeing what would happen if we decided that they don’t fit neatly into these categories [of use and exchange value]. Because they’re kind of tools, in which case they absolutely have use value, and sometimes they literally are tools. If you see a film with someone typing on a typewriter, it’s literalising its function there as an instrument of labour. I think the prop is always related to the question of labour.

In that people have to work to make it?

They have to work to make it and it’s used by actors to mediate and make possible their own labour, and the excerpted chapter on the MUBI website goes into that. So they’re products of labour, they’re instruments of labour, they bring into view often the unsung labours of people who are sort of below the line, the production team, and make that visible in some way – but it’s visibly invisible, it’s really there but no one’s asking you to think about it. I think once you start looking at any discrete element of a film production process, you start thinking about how it got there and who put it there and what is the complexity of this labour process.

In a way, those objects are un-becoming commodities. They’re going from a commodity to a specific object by being in a film.

Depending on what they are. A can of Coke is a can of Coke. Probably, if you need to have it in the film, you just go buy it. You won’t make a fake one. Our book does appear as a fake prop in the film by Joanna Hogg [Autobiografia di una Borsetta] – we wanted her to blurb the book, so we sent it to her in the summer, by that time there was a cover design, she read it and decided she wanted to make a film kind of inspired by it, and then they fabricated a fake version of the prop. They wrapped our cover around a crossword puzzle book and you see it fleetingly on the table of this house in Tuscany. I think that’s surely – whatever kind of a first that is, it’s a kind of first where a book about the prop appears as itself but via an artificial version of itself before it existed in the world.

Are those more interesting to you, those props that don’t have a use value outside of the film?

I think they point more towards artisanal labour, so in a sense they almost summon a world of pre-capitalist material production. There’s a very famous prop storeroom near Cinecittà which services the film world, but also the theatre and the opera world, and there’s a whole row, for example, of just swords. They start with the earliest form of a sword and they end with more like eighteenth-century fencing swords. You go into a little studio or laboratory and they’re making chain mail in this very artisanal way. So the mode of production is actually mirroring the period to which the prop belongs: there’s a kind of medieval labour that is going on in this prop production in the storeroom.

That’s kind of interesting because it points to the way that film is one of the most modern media, often compared to Fordism in terms of the division of labour and its industrialised mode of production, but inside that organisation are these storerooms which actually harken back to pre-capitalist modes of production. And that’s why I think the ‘studio’ is an interesting term, because we think back to the artist’s studio, the studio of someone like Caravaggio, where there’s a kind of artisanal mode of production that is pocketed inside this bigger industrial machine that itself is then itself imbricated in a world of industrial manufacture.

What’s the most interesting prop in a film for you?

I’m kind of interested in fake paintings. I lecture on this, actually – there’s a Morandi, and I don’t think it’s a real Morandi, that you see in the background, initially, in this important scene in Fellini’s La dolce vita, which is a very complex film that is incredibly studied but also has the air of being incredibly carefree. You kind of glimpse it in the background, behind the characters’ heads, and an observing, cultured spectator would think, ‘I think I saw a Morandi in the background’ – but then a few beats later, a character’s attention is drawn to it and they’re like, ‘Ah, Morandi! Nothing is left to chance. It’s a perfect registration of the world. Every stroke is considered.’ Something to that effect. And suddenly this thing that had been more incidental and propping up a fictional world becomes an allegory of Fellini’s mode of production itself. And then it’s interesting to me that it’s also, obviously, yet another work of art. So you’ve got this sort of mise en abîme. I think that scene tells, in miniature, the dynamic of the prop that maybe we’re not supposed to look at, and then the prop that is demanding to be acknowledged, and I think that undecidability is interestingly at the heart of the project.