books
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with John David Rhodes
New York: Cutaways Series, Fordham University Press
March 4 2025
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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 “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.
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Reviews
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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
“Rigorously argued and stylistically compelling, this slender volume contains big ideas that will change the way we think about props in film.”---Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown University
“Philosophically minded and wonderfully playful, The Prop is study of film objects and an exploration of property relations. Gorfinkel and Rhodes explore the deep connections between props and commodities, the profit-motives of cinema, and the often-hidden labor of film production. This book teaches readers a great deal about the objects that tangibly connect the film image to the political economy that produced it. Given the élan of their writing and the wit of their critical imagination, The Prop is also just a very fun book to read.”---Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt University
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​London: BFI Film Classics/Bloomsbury,
May 29 2025
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Actor-turned-writer/director Barbara Loden's only feature film, Wanda (1970), tells the story of an alienated working-class woman, Wanda Goronski (played by Loden), who abandons her life as a coal miner's wife and mother, electing instead to drift. Bracing in its realist texture and proto-feminist in its sensibility, it received critical acclaim upon release, winning the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. Today, Wanda is considered one of the most notable films made by a woman director and a core work of American independent cinema.
Elena Gorfinkel's study of this singular film traces Loden's creative process and unconventional approach to filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, including scripts, interviews, production records, oral history, and previously unseen ephemera, she examines the film's de-dramatised aesthetic, one that rebukes the artifice and “slickness” of Hollywood. Gorfinkel considers Loden's craft in her framing of cinematic time, manipulation of gesture, voice, and posture, narrative ellipsis, and in her use of location and non-professional actors. Providing an account of Wanda's exhibition and reception in the 1970s and after, she traces the film's feminist legacies, and its lasting influence on contemporary filmmakers, artists and writers.
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Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
312 pp.
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The untold story of the American sexploitation film—a major development in screen sex in the decade before “porno chic,” Lewd Looks recovers a lost chapter in the history of independent cinema and American culture.
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Read the introduction here
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Reviewed in: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television, GLQ:A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Jump Cut, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Film Quarterly, Film International, Cineaste, Choice, Popmatters, Screening Sex, Synoptique
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Reviews & endorsements:
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"Sex sells, but it also speaks, and few have listened more attentively than Elena Gorfinkel. In Lewd Looks, she untangles the dense, complicated looking relations of the sexploitation film cycle that most have brushed off as a speed bump on the race to hardcore, revealing it instead as a staging of the fundamental American ambivalence and anxiety regarding sex. Full of recovered moments of previously-lost film history and piercing analytical insights, this brilliant book peers avidly into the cinematic gutter, seeing the truths of our culture floating there."
— Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
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"Groundbreaking and exquisitely presented. With a fearless dedication to archival research, Elena Gorfinkel forges an original research trajectory that can be productively extended to other under-researched media forms as well as mainstream media."— Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara
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"Lewd Looks is at once enlightening and fascinating." —
Choice
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"Lewd Looks usefully leans into the contradictions of censorship and gender representation that extend beyond the tease of sexploitation into the hypervisible world of pornography today." — Film Quarterly
"Gorfinkel's book, while it focuses on the 1960s, feels relevant to the experience of being a woman in 2018." —Cineaste
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"Elena Gorfinkel’s Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s is an important entry into the porn studies field not only for its robust scholarship but also for its call to arms. The reluctance to address sexually explicit, simulated films is a limitation to porn studies as a whole in as much as excluding the study of softcore provides an incomplete picture of pornographic media over the decades."— New Review of Film and Television
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"Lewd Looks brings a feminist perspective to this cultural history, from investigations of female erotic looking and erotic spectacle to women's labor, female audiences, and questions of modern womanhood. Rather than a knee-jerk condemnation of the spectacularization of women's bodies, Gorfinkel displays a genuine interest in the films, allowing her to discover the more complex cultural work they were doing and take seriously the labor of the women who worked both in front of and behind the camera … Lewd Looks has laid a crucial foundation for scholarship on American sexploitation cinema, as well as legal and cultural negotiations over sex and obscenity in the 1960s. Extensive research allows Gorfinkel to describe this complex cultural terrain with new detail and accuracy while also pointing to the ways these films shift our understandings of film form, spectatorship, and sexual representation. The book will be of great interest to scholars, instructors, and students of gender and sexuality in media, film history, and American cultural studies." — Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
"Elena Gorfinkel’s astonishing book Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s seeks, in part, to drain some of the historical chauvinism out of the notion that viewers of 1960s sexploitation films were naïve explorers who had to settle for implicit images before the explosion of hardcore pornography marked by the popularity of Deep Throat in 1972. At once a reception study, an industry analysis, a history, and a series of textual analyses, Lewd Looks lends sexploitation the kind of thick description the genre has so sorely lacked in film scholarship".— JUMP CUT
edited with Tami Williams
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 284 pp.
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Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the 21st century. Contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence.
Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image
edited with John David Rhodes
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
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Taking Place argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media.
