This paper concerns the judgement and critique of athletic movement in moving images. Inspired by the ski crash trial case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, and by comparing different media representations of downhill skiing, the essay outlines a framework that discerns as well as connects elements of movement and images, developing the concept of the ‘diorama’ in relation to Deleuze’s notion of the diagram and Kant’s idea of critique. Thus, moving images featuring elite alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, fictional character James Bond, and an official skiing game for the international ski federation (World Cup Ski Racing, FIS) figure as comparative material to the animation that played a central role in the celebrity trial. Diorama and diagram are posited on a continuum to assess when and how judgement takes place in each of the exhibits. The essay concludes by discussing how the judging of athletic movement in moving images contributed to Paltrow winning the case, and theoretically by connecting this finding to dioramas and diagrams as tools apt for a framework aiming at the critique of athletic movement in moving images. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In “Postscript on Societies of Control”, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proclaimed that “Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports”. By this, he alluded to Foucault’s thoughts on older societal regimes and power diagrams of sovereignty and discipline, and that now such models have been supplemented with governance through control and allegations of increased freedom. This article has as its point of departure the potential of sports to reflect social change. Contemporaneously to the coining of Deleuze’s surfing sentence, a new sport emerges: parkour, in which practitioners “surf” the urban realm. This practice gained attention globally when it was featured in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. The analysis in this article revolves around the different ways of moving in and through the environment in the renowned parkour chase in the beginning of the movie. How do different kinds of displacement in the parkour chase of Casino Royale relate to the transition between the societies described by Deleuze, and what new adaptations emerge and what old logics and models return? It is concluded that the older forms of power prevail and that the ideal of the society of control cannot be realised.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the history of home automation, by looking at how the automation of private life in homes of the future have been imagined for the past 100 years. The notion of an automated house brings home ideas of efficiency and productivity which are otherwise reserved for working life, putting the human perspective at the fore by implying values expected for the individual or the family. When the architect Le Corbusier in 1923 proposed that a house should be seen as a “machine for living in”, he initiated a modernist view which conflates architecture and technology in an ideal of functionality; it takes machinery in the industrial age as its model but places it in the private sphere of the home. Promotional and instructional material reflect a development of this imaginary into the present day. From the 1930s on, this vision is exhibited at world fairs and home shows, where model homes are not only planned for optimal functionality but are increasingly filled with technology that would facilitate domestic life. From the 1960s, the mechanical home begins to be supplanted with prospects of computerisation, paving the way for an idea of ‘smart’ homes, built on digital, interactive technologies, until needs are anticipated by artificial intelligence. The current prospect of living in a ‘metaverse’ implies a virtual home which brings into question the very nature of physical dwelling.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze repeatedly referred to a wide range of sports and games throughout his career. This article assembles a comprehensive view of the philosophy of sport seen from Deleuze’s perspective. By studying the development of how he discussed different sports and games, and by pinpointing the concepts he constructed with reference to them, the article attests to the merits of a Deleuzian philosophy of sports. His term athleticism is utilised as a node to overview his allusions to sports and games in general. Special attention is paid to sport as a companion to the creative domains of science, philosophy, and art. Thus, it is concluded that what athletes create are moves, which amounts to inventing new styles which may alter the sport and attest to new ways of thinking through bodies in motion. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article revolves around conceptualising temporality and drama, with the example of how the broken time sequestered by Karl Marx’s notion of historical repetition and the struggles relating to this, in his supplement to Hegel, is displayed in James Bond films. A focus of the inquiry is an hauntological analysis (in the Derridean sense) of how the connection between heroism and tragedy in films evokes haunting presences of older versions of Bond, between actors, between films, and within the specific story arcs. While the heroism of Bond is exemplified by his sportive endeavours, time and temporality are understood as repetition, and foremost in relation to the phenomenon of the reboot—a specialty of our protagonist. In his battles with various villains, Bond becomes embroiled in action sequences that are curiously spiced up with extreme sporting activities. Such sports are often transformed in the cinematic context: sometimes they are emphasised for stylisations of prowess and violence; sometimes they are distorted into parody and comic relief, in an oftentimes ironic fashion. Fulfilling Marx’s adage about how history repeats itself (“first as tragedy, then as farce”), Bond’s personage not only reappears in different incarnations, portrayed by different actors over time; each actor also repeats a similar pattern in their respective Bond biographies enacting a sustained heroism emanating from the extreme athletic displays in the agonal theatre of sports.

This presentation concerns how the term “popular” is actualized in James Bond films, and specifically how sports are played out in the saga. While both sports and Bond are pivotal parts of Western popular culture from the mid-20th century and onwards, their relationship is ambiguous. In his battles with various villains, Bond becomes embroiled in action sequences that are curiously spiced up with sporting activities. Such sports are often culturally coded in ways that represent certain social classes and practices (leisure, extreme, etc.) but are transformed in the cinematic context: sometimes they are emphasized for stylizations of prowess and violence; sometimes they are distorted into parody and comic relief. The agent’s sportive ambiguities are emblematic of the ambivalent status of Bond’s character in contemporary culture, pivoting between high and low, elites and masses. Fulfilling Marx’s adage about how history repeats itself (“first as tragedy, then as farce”), Bond’s personage not only reappears in different incarnations, portrayed by different actors over time; each actor also repeats a similar pattern in their respective Bond biographies that is enacted through the employment of sports. We conclude by claiming that when Bond distorts sports the meaning of the term “popular” per se is problematized.

The aim of this paper is to study how storytelling is used by Swedish country houses as a marketing strategy, to communicate the values and meaning of heritage, with the specific example of Tjolöholm Castle outside of Kungsbacka, Sweden.

Our guiding questions revolve around the multiplicity of narrative modes that are actually or potentially present in such communication: What stories are told and what stories could be told? Also, how have stories been told and how can they be told, with regards to developments in technology and media? With this, we intend to show how different cultural and historical values are integrated into the estate, as a building and its environs, and communicated by various means, particularly with commercial interests in mind. The estate itself constitutes a mix of old and new, represented by the ambivalent emphasis on a retro-Tudor style contrasted with a focus on highly modern conveniences and technologies, as well as a blend of the foreign and the domestic, represented by the Britishness of the arts and crafts interior and the exterior gardens and landscape, bordering a typical Swedish seascape.

The analysis will focus on two levels of storytelling: one a manifest level of commercial communication in guided tours and on the website in the present day, the other a hidden layer of the original intentions revealed by the historical records, such as the collection of letters from Blanche Dickson to the architect at the time of construction in the early 20th century. Stories can be made materially manifest through the architecture, the décor and the landscaping design, forming a remaining trace of the original conception of the country house, or they can be mediated through present day interpretations and appropriations in popular culture.

A particular case in point is Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), which used the castle as its principal filming location and as a backdrop to its apocalyptic plot, and how the film was then employed as a marketing device on the castle’s website in collaboration with Gothenburg Film Festival; in this way, a new, external narrative is being added to the already multilayered story of Tjolöholm Castle. The built environment, its existing and its emergent narratives might then be seen as a historical palimpsest, where the past, present and future overlap in a continuing, maybe never-ending construction of stories. 

In “Postscript on Societies of Control”, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proclaimed that “Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports”. By this, he alluded to Foucault’s thoughts on older societal regimes and power diagrams of sovereignty and discipline, and that now such models have been supplemented with governance through control and allegations of increased freedom. This article has as its point of departure the potential of sports to reflect social change. Contemporaneously to the coining of Deleuze’s surfing sentence, a new sport emerges: parkour, in which practitioners “surf” the urban realm. This practice gained attention globally when it was featured in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. The analysis in this article revolves around the different ways of moving in and through the environment in the renowned parkour chase in the beginning of the movie. How do different kinds of displacement in the parkour chase of Casino Royale relate to the transition between the societies described by Deleuze, and what new adaptations emerge and what old logics and models return? It is concluded that the older forms of power prevail and that the ideal of the society of control cannot be realised. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This article investigates the utopian visions of extreme sports as a postwar phenomenon by contrasting it to the violence of the extreme sport practitioner par excellence in postwar/cold war cinema: James Bond. Continental philosophy and cultural studies furnish extreme sport as a manifold of wholesome, meaningful, sustainable, life-enhancing, and environmentally intimate practices, less orientated toward human rivalry than its traditional namesake. Certain attention is thus paid to the movement of sliding in extreme sports that thrive on powerful natural forces such as air, wind, snowy slopes, and big waves, creating an ambivalent field between mastery and letting oneself go. Sliding, or glissade, is treated as a “figure of thought” that Bond is mustered to embody and enact with his extreme athletic repertoire. The analysis of James Bond’s extreme sport sliding is contrasted to the musings of glissade philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres. It is concluded that if there is utopianism in James Bond’s extreme sport performances, it is in the sliding itself, while the attaining of that state is paved with violence towards everything material. The article reinforces the concept of the extreme in relation to sport as a processual tool, rather than a category describing a fixed set of characteristics adhering to a certain practice.© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This paper explores the concept of utopia in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and its significance for cinema, placing his and Félix Guattari’s “geophilosophy” in the context of posthumanist ecocriticism. It relocates the notion of utopia from out of a paradigm of political fiction and speculations of a possible social progress, towards Deleuze & Guattari’s ideas of a geography and topology of time as conditions for creative thought. Considering the importance of the concepts of becoming and virtuality in this philosophy, a utopian image is no mere speculation or representation, but a force of creation. Deleuze’s notion that philosophers and artists share the task of resisting the present in creatively thinking “a new people” and “a new earth” can be developed to view film as a medium for re-imagining nature, creating a new set of earth-images or geosigns for future thought.