Introduction to Special Issue: Film Objects

Elizabeth Ezra, University of Stirling

Catherine Wheatley , King’s College London

From the earliest days of film theory to the present, scholars of

the moving image have made the claim that cinema is a medium
that is particularly well suited to show us things. On film, all matter is
ontologically equal – as Paul Willemen puts it, even the lustiest of genres,
pornography, becomes overwhelmed by stuff when translated to screen: a
literary fantasy can proceed very well, he says, without having to specify
the pattern on the wallpaper; a filmic fantasy cannot (Willemen, 1992,
p.179). In occupying filmic space, objects are a key component of mise-en-
scène, but they also have a narrative function, and often carry symbolic or
affective weight. Objects can be portable, like a glove or a rice cooker, or
they can be part of the fabric of a place, like doors or floor tiles. Objects
can also contain their own kinetic energy, whether self-propelling or
animated by other forces such as electricity or wind. As with painted
portraiture, objects in films can tell us about the socio-economic milieu of
the characters, the era in which they live, and even the personalities or
indeed obsessions of the people with whom they are associated. This is
perhaps why the philosopher Iris Murdoch thinks of cinema as an art of
the interior. As she puts it, objects in films are never normal, since they
strike us there with a renewed force. Film, that is, shows us “a strange and
startling world, disintegrated and distorted, and full of dramatically
significant objects” (Murdoch, 1956/2016). And on screen, even humans

Film-Philosophy 27.1 (2023): 1–6

DOI: 10.3366/film.2023.0213
© Elizabeth Ezra and Catherine Wheatley. This article is published as Open Access
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence
(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits
non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the original work is
cited. For commercial re-use, please refer to our website at: www.euppublishing.
com/customer-services/authors/permissions.
www.euppublishing.com/film

1
 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

themselves become objects, their faces transformed into “interesting

surfaces” (1956/2016).
In post-humanist and materialist philosophy, objects take pride of
place. However, we cannot reduce objects to their material parts, because
objects are defined equally by the way in which these parts are organised;
nor can we separate objects from the ways in which they organise and are
organised within the world. Objects mediate relations between people,
but they also exist in relation to people and to other objects. It is not our
intention to dwell on or in the distinction between objects and things, the
latter of which has been described by Bill Brown, channelling Heidegger,
as objects that “stop working for us” (2001, p 4). Suffice to say that objects
by definition confirm the role of the subject. Subjects are everywhere
implicit in film objects, which, like all objects, have porous borders with
humans (see Ezra 2017). Many objects are not only made by humans; they
are also marked and altered by human use (e.g., a pencil, a pie, or
anything that can be worn or worn down). Objects and people work in
concert (sometimes in harmony, and sometimes at odds with each other),
forming what the late Bruno Latour has called a “Parliament of Things”
(Latour, 1993).
To say that objects are worthy of examination, however, is not to be a
proponent of flat ontology, a term used by both proponents and critics of
Object-Oriented Ontology to describe a worldview in which all things,
sentient and non-sentient, are put on an equal footing (see Bogost, 2012;
Harman, 2018; and DeLanda, 2016). Instead, we advocate in this special
issue for something more closely resembling a craggy ontology: while all
things matter, not all things matter in the same way, and all relationships
between subjects and objects are not the same, whether within or
across cultures. Flat ontology may have been conceived as a response to
the overwhelming barrage of stuff we encounter in advanced consumer
culture: the litanies of objects in object-oriented ontology are likely a
reflection of the never-ending parade of commodities that surround us
in our daily lives, whose packaging overflows our recycling bins and
threatens to engulf us in plastic and use-by dates and exhortations to Taste
the Difference, to buy (and be) the Best, the Finest, the Extra Special. In
late capitalism, objects often acquire at least as much, if not more,
significance than people. Commodity fetishism disavows both the labour
and the social relations that go into producing the object, and like sexual
fetishism (where the object, by its proximity to an imagined absence, is
enlisted to stand in for another object that was never there in the first
place), it is essentially a logic of substitution. “No no no”, it tells us, “don’t
look there; instead, look over here – this is much nicer”. Commodity
fetishism takes the idea of looking here instead of there and applies it to

2
 Introduction: Film Objects

things you can buy: you want happiness, but you buy things. You want
fulfilment, but you buy more things. This is most obvious perhaps in
the fashion industries, which are inherently bound up with what
Derrida calls supplementarity (1976, pp. 144–45), and what Bernard
Stiegler (1988) calls prosthesis – those purchases intended to enhance
or complete something previously thought to be complete, but which
only reveals how incomplete it was. However it is not only fashion, but
planned obsolescence more generally that lends itself particularly well
to this dynamic, generating products that, by focusing on the “new”, are
the opposite of “renewable”. It is in the context of global commodity
culture that the recent tendency to ascribe agency to things should be
understood.
At the same time, we are encompassed by what Baudelaire might call
a “forêt de symboles” in which we get lost virtually every day, whose main
purpose is to convince us to purchase more objects, more property,
whether tangible or intellectual. The proliferation of virtual objects has
not been far behind that of tangible objects, and the two seem, at the very
least, interlinked. That there has recently been a surge in interest in non-
fungible tokens (NFTs) suggests the pull of what Benjamin (1968/1935)
identified as the aura of a work of art, but which could be extended to
non-art objects, and which exerts influence even within a virtual world
whose codes are by their very definition reproducible. When tangible
objects – objects you can touch, eat, or trip over – are shown in film, of
course, they lose their tangibility in a literal sense, becoming flattened
within the film’s endless capacity for technical reproducibility. Yet film
objects exert a kind of auratic pull on the viewer, conjuring up the
impression of a materiality to which viewers of images on a screen do not
have access, and evoking a nostalgia for something we can no longer
grasp.
In the last two decades, film-philosophical scholarship has taken a
material turn, with hapticity, sensation, and embodiment the focus
of many scholarly studies (see, for example, Marks 2000, Sobchack
2004, Barker 2009, Beugnet 2012). What is it that prompts thinking
about touch and other sensations if not objects in their very materiality?
Objects are accessible through all the senses—not only touch, but smell,
sound, taste, and primarily in film, vision. Since film is a visual and aural
medium, the material presence of objects must be conveyed metonymi-
cally, through sight and sound. In both stage craft and in film, the objects
that form part of the mise-en-scène are props. The term “properties”
suggests both ownership and a thing’s characteristics. Some props, if
portable, change hands in a film, and then continue to change hands in
the film’s afterlife, in auctions of objects such as costumes and other

3
 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

iconic props, where buyers try to procure for themselves a bit of the
object’s aura (and by extension that of the film). For example, in 1982,
Stephen Spielberg purchased the “Rosebud” sled from Citizen Kane for
$55,000, one of three balsa wood sleds made to be burned at the end of
the film, in addition to the pinewood sled shown early in the film.
Needless to say, Dorothy Gale’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz
(1939) have also been the coveted object of fascination at auctions and
exhibitions (see Lodwick 2020). Even costumes worn by or associated
with film stars outside of their film work exude an unmistakable aura,
such as Marilyn Monroe’s dress worn by Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala
in 2022.
The articles gathered here span the history and the breadth of cinema,
from early silent film to contemporary television, from Hollywood to
Turkey and China, drawing on a range of philosophical and theoretical
traditions. Fittingly, then, the collection opens with the image of a train,
one that will connect Japan to France via Yasujiro ˉ Ozu’s Late Spring
(Banshun, 1949) and Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums, 2008).
In her elegant examination of the latter film, Saige Walton connects
Denis’s poetic foregrounding of objects to Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy
of reverie and repose. In addition to trains, Walton considers the
centrality of rice cookers and lanterns to the film’s affective dimension,
claiming that they “reverberate” formally and sensually both within the
film and for the spectator, contributing to an experience of the film as
day-dream-like (albeit one that is not without disruption).
Like Walton, Jiaying Sim is interested in the connection between
objects and affect. Sim’s article, on Qi Pao and Mahjong in Ang Lee’s
Lust, Caution (2007), argues that when the human bodies on screen
interact with certain objects such as these, they become part of an
“affective assemblage”. Sim analyses how the ways in which these objects
are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen reveal hidden
dynamics behind characters’ relationships and overarching narratives
off-screen, functioning as a kind of material subtext. In her analysis
of “Hitchcock’s undertexts”, meanwhile, Brigitte Peucker explores the
relationship between language and objects on screen. Pointing to the
ongoing absence of language in the study of cinematic objects, Peucker
asks what we might learn when we reinstate it as one of a number of
operations that are determinative of film objects, which are, as she points
out, often caught between the literal and the figurative.
Two pieces focus on the same filmmaker, Ernst Lubitsch, whose works,
like Denis’s show a particular affinity for objects – one might say, too,
a special fondness for them. Noa Merkin’s analysis of Lubitsch’s “love
objects” – the objects that circulate within and around romantic

4
 Introduction: Film Objects

relationships in The Marriage Circle (1924) and Trouble in Paradise (1932) -

looks at how these objects manifest the films’ erotic undertones. Drawing
on film theorists from Jean Epstein to Lesley Stern, Merkin reveals an
underappreciated history of theoretical thinking about film objects,
and proposes a new materialistic reading of touch and tactility centered
around the filmic object, one that emphasises the pleasure that film
objects can bring us. Ido Lewit likewise discovers a connection between
objects and heterosexual relationships in an article on the function of the
door in the work of both Lubitsch – in particular his 1916 film When
I Was Dead – and Charlie Chaplin, but one that operates to rather less
pleasant ends. Shifting focus from the role of objects in interpersonal
relations to their intersection with politic dynamics, Lewit compares
When I Was Dead with Chaplin’s The Adventurer, to argue that the door
functions in Lubitsch’s domestic set-up as part of an exploration of sexual
difference and gender relations, and in Chaplin’s film as a critique of class
and modernity. Lewit thus situates both films and their objects within
their specific historical-geographical contexts, while reframing classic
cinema through the mobilisation of philosophers and theorists such as
Friedrich Kittler and Georg Simmel, ultimately positing the door not
merely as object but as a kind of cultural technique.
The issue closes with two pieces that focus on our contemporary
media moment, but that, like Lewit’s article, work to situate film objects
in relation to particular histories. Emily Sanders’s analysis of Jean-Marc
Vallée’s HBO miniseries, Sharp Objects (2018) traces a material history
of white supremacy through a focus on the ivory tiles lining the floor
of the series’ matriarch (Patricia Clarkson). Drawing on Object-Oriented
Ontology, Thing Theory and Critical Race Theory, Sanders makes a
persuasive case for the tiles as objects that exceed their “thingness”,
exposing the systems of violence that underpin the film’s narrative and
aesthetics. Finally, Olivia Landry turns to the 2020 Turkish Netflix series
Bir Başkadır (Ethos) in order to show how, through objects, the past and
present coalesce. Sifting through the myriad objects collected here, and
drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Andreas Huyssen and Catherine
Russell, Landry asks that we understand this film – perhaps all film – as
a kind of museum.
Individually and together, these articles testify to the rich insights that
can be gleaned and forms of knowledge generated by paying attention to
the objects that populate our screens: not just cinema screens, of course,
but those of our televisions and, by implication, our computer screens
and mobile devices. This issue is far from exhaustive on the topic – how
could it be, when film objects are so many and so various? – but it aims at
furthering conversations and prompting inspiration for further work on

5
 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

film objects. It is not the purpose of this special issue to establish a

hierarchy of subjects and objects. Instead, we propose to look at objects as
the subjects of their own stories. We do not claim that objects thrum, or
vibrate, or sing, but they do speak, in a manner of speaking. The authors
in this special issue seek to tell the stories of these objects — or more
precisely, to listen and reply to the stories they tell.

ORCID
Catherine Wheatley https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1085-2904

REFERENCES
Barker, J. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. University of California
Press.
Benjamin, W. (1935/1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In
H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.) (pp. 214–218). Fontana.
Beugnet, M. (2012). Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression.
Edinburgh University Press.
Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. University of Minnesota
Press.
Brown, B. (2001). Thing theory, Critical Inquiry, 28(1), 1–22.
DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press.
Derrida, J. (1967/1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Ezra, E. (2017). The cinema of things: Globalization and the posthuman object. Bloomsbury.
Harman, G. (2018). Object-oriented ontology: A new theory of everything. Pelican Books.
Jordan, J. (2012). “A thingy world”: Iris Murdoch’s stuff. The Modern Language Review.
107(2), 364–378.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Lodwick, K. (2020). The ruby slippers at the V&A: An odyssey. In E. Ezra & C. Wheatley
(Eds.), Shoe reels: The history and philosophy of footwear in film (pp. 62–67). Edinburgh
University Press.
Marks, L. U. (2000). The skin of the film: Intercultural film, embodiment and the senses. Duke
University Press.
Murdoch, I. (1956/2016, May 17). On the cinema. Vogue. https://www.vogue.co.
uk/article/vogue-archive-article-iris-murdoch.
Sobchack, V. (2004). Carnal thoughts: Embodiment and moving image culture. University of
California Press.
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time, volume 1: The fault of Epimetheus (R. Beardsworth &
G. Collins, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Willemen, P. (1992). Letter to John. In Screen Editorial Collective (Eds.), The Sexual Subject:
A Screen Reader in Sexuality (pp. 171–183). Routledge.