Severed Objects: Spellbound, Archives, Exhibitions, and Film’s Material History

Chancing upon the prop scissors from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) led me to explore the importance of saving film artifacts and the complex process of providing access to them. Examining how they might be presented for public education, I follow the scissors through production notes, photographs, documentaries, a visit to an archive, and a museum exhibit. Each juncture in the journey highlights how conservation can work at cross purposes with education, and how exhibition decisions can turn props into baubles—or into resonant embodiments of the creative labor of filmmaking. Such an experience, I argue, requires archives to accommodate intimate sensory engagements with artifacts.