Judging athletic movement in moving images: a critique of agonic reason in representations of alpine sport, seen through the Paltrow v. Sanderson ski crash trial

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• diagram
• diorama
• downhill racing
• esport

During the highly mediatized 2023 ‘ski crash trial’ (Hauser 2023), biomechanical expert Dr. Irving Scher multimodally reconstructed a collision between two recreational skiers on a Utah slope: film star Gwyneth Paltrow and retired optometrist Terry Sanderson. Sanderson sued Paltrow for allegedly having caused him severe physical damages, and Paltrow countersued. The media circus began. Part of the commotion was a computer simulation, produced by an animation studio to illustrate Paltrow’s version of the event, based on the eyewitness testimony of a ski instructor, to which Dr. Scher provided the commentary. Both the athleticism on display and the imagery conveying it were low-end, to say the least, as if reflecting some vulgarity of the proceedings. Before giving his expert testimony, Dr. Scher couldn’t help cracking a smile; his smirk was only prefacing the absurdity of his subsequent commentary, in which the collision was described with terms such as ‘spooning’ and ‘the pizza position’. But reflecting on its outcome, he switched to a kinesiological lingo, speculating on which displacements would have caused which injuries. In brief, Dr. Scher demonstrated an impressive breadth of how to analyse and evaluate athletic movement in moving images. Either his vulgarising or his kinesiological assessments made possible judicial judgement and, in one capacity or another, influenced the judgement of public opinion. Drawing upon this example, we aim to inquire into what is at stake in judging athletic movement in moving images—ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically.

Motion pictures and movement in pictures are integral to our culture. How movement is planned, performed, depicted, and evaluated is important to all scholars of sport, as well as to the whole of the film and TV audiences, the gamers and internet surfers, all-consuming vast amounts of various forms of moving images. Images are also integral to the status and relevance of sport, and they have been so since it began to take the form that we recognize it as today; for this reason, Mike Huggins (2008) warrants a visual turn in sport history in order for scholars to fully be able to comprehend this pivotal phenomenon with regards to cultural politics, social contexts, and power relations. While the eye knows sport, the rhetorical devices to describe what is seen and shown are lacking, according to Huggins, in the text-oriented repertoire of the sport historian. Since Huggins aims at the history of sport, the images focussed mainly adhere to the still image category, such as paintings and photographs. Moving imagery, however, presents a special challenge in the emergent field of visually oriented sport studies. While this paper does not address the history of sport specifically, we believe that the general study of sport might benefit from a thorough exposition of how to value and judge athletic movement in moving images.

The critical, agonic issues with depictions and descriptions of movement in moving images began to be theorised in the aftermath of the 1991 Rodney King trial, which concerned a black man who had been beaten severely by four Los Angeles police officers. Infamously, the seven minute video clip that captured the beating of King by the police officers was presented as evidence in court by the prosecution, but was used by the defence, in a sly exercise in distorting movie editing, to suggest that the true aggressor was King and the true victims were the police: ‘By cutting and isolating images on the video, the defence neutralised the frenzy of violence captured therein and managed to dehumanise Mr King. [—] When defence lawyers reviewed the flurry of blows, they repeatedly stopped, or slowed down the tape to show that police were either missing their victim, or retreating, in possible fear, from the man’ (Morrison 1995, 445–446). As a result, the police officers were acquitted. This case is a classic example of how mediality affords the potential for strategic manipulation of perception, spawning further media representations of crime in the ensuing riots in our visually saturated culture (Katz 2016, 233–251). Furthermore, the case itself is evidence that photography cannot be assumed to be disinterested, neutral, objective representations of reality (Biber 2020, 19–20).

After the Rodney King trial there have followed many cases that were either based on such mediatisation or that resulted in it. As a subset of famous cases, there was a branching off of cases of the famous, bringing celebrities to the court as potential criminals, meshing legal and media representation. The Paltrow v. Sanderson trial was brought to the public through various types of images. Some are clips of the plaintiffs/defendants being questioned as witnesses; some are clips of other witnesses, such as Dr. Scher, whose testimonies themselves included imagery—most notably, a whiteboard illustration of stick-figures and the crucial CGI simulation of avatars. The further circulation of these clips in social media produces seemingly endless varieties of memes. The trial cannot be reduced to any singular medium but encompasses much of our contemporary media ecology. Even so, the CGI simulation of the ski crash has a special status, being the most complete attempt at representing the event visually, motion intact, analysed with scientific expertise.

The simulation of the ski crash actualises the aesthetic, ethic, and judicial dimensions of the agonics of athletic movement in moving images. What is so conspicuous about it is that, while Gwyneth Paltrow certainly brought the glitz to court with her cinematic stardom and stealth wealth couture, the prowess and struggle usually associated with sports are detracted from the animated simulation. In truth, sports, not least skiing, have an ambiguous relationship with an agonic ethos. Skiing is one of the sports de glisse (sliding sports), which philosophers of sport have associated with peace, harmony, and non-competitiveness (Connor 2011, 209–215). These sports are different from the more traditional, athletic endeavours associated with Greek agonic ideals. But as we will see, there is a significant difference between recreational skiing and the professional, competitive kind. And in the case of the ski crash trial, the agonic ethos of competitiveness is reintroduced, rather than detracted, by virtue of the judicial setting, and the prowess is reintroduced through media.

An axiom of the visual turn is that images aren’t 1:1 representations of reality. Given this, the way to proceed in an image analysis presents a forking path. Huggins (2008) identifies possible routes, such as iconology, semiotics, deconstruction, and gaze theory, with theorists such as Laura Mulvey (and her thoughts on ‘the male gaze’) and Michel Foucault (and his thoughts on the ‘panopticon’), This is not the place to discuss them in detail, but suffice it to say that each route would offer ways to systematically approach images with a focus on depiction, production, and reception, as well as on their underlying ideology, context, and technical conditions. Such perspectives are helpful with regards to being both theoretical support and a methodological toolbox for sorting out the spatio-temporal specificities of sport images.

While this way of approaching the visual aspects of sport emphasises disclosure, we are more interested in discernment—what assessments or judgement of movement that moving images effect. We focus on how the sporting event and its meaning is constructed by the imagery of movements, involving actions, perceptions, and reflections. As these latter terms indicate, our approach accords with the Bergsonian conception of cinematic imagery as ‘movement-image’ proposed by Gilles Deleuze ([1983] 1999) rather than to Saussurean semiology or the ideologically inflected gaze theory inspired by Lacanian psychosemiotics. However, we will do this by presenting a concept borrowed from a proto-cinematic contraption which was contemporary to other expressions and technologies of the 19th century iconographic revolution that etched sport on the collective consciousness and common cultural ground of modern man: the diorama (Daguerre 1839; cf Huggins 2008, 317).

Compared to other more cinematographic visualisations of skiing (such as those broadcasting elite alpine sports or those presenting bold action movies in snowy settings), the plaintiffs of the ski crash trial are athletically unimpressive. The meagre sportive merits displayed show that the skiers were unprepared physically, but perhaps also mentally, for the unfolding of the event. All assessments of movement had to occur in hindsight, by experts of CGI technology, of biomechanics, and of law. This is where the diorama is produced: through it, we look back to see what happened. Thus, we are answering Huggins’s (2008, 325–6) call about the under-explored condition of aesthetics of movement and the lack of understanding of subjective and aesthetic judgement in sport, by deliberating on what judgments they effectuate, rhetorically and d(io)ramatically.

Inspired by the case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, by comparing different moving pictures of skiing, we will outline a theoretical framework to discern as well as to connect elements of movement and images. We put the framework to the test with regards to how judgement is executed in relation to both kinematics and the cinematic. While the wider aim of this inquiry is to initiate a discussion about the judgement of athletic movement in moving images, intimating a ‘critique of judgement’ of sport imagery, the twofold purpose of the study is to 1) furnish a theoretical understanding of the simulation of the Utah ski crash as a ‘diorama’ in order to reveal the agonic interplay of the juridical and medial dimensions of the trial, and 2) to evaluate the movement of said diorama and then compare it to movement in other instances of alpine sports footage, both cinematographic and animated, in which proficient prowess and agonic tension are manifested.

The ensuing essay is structured as follows: Firstly, we will methodologically import the diorama. Secondly, we will single out the specificities of the animated diorama from the ski crash trial, to be able to compare it with other representations of alpine athleticism. One particularly topical example is another animated simulation of skiing: the international Ski federation’s entry into the world of esports via the smartphone-game World Cup Ski Racing, FIS. Comparing reality and fiction, we will also explore the exploits of downhill lodestar Mikaela Shiffrin and marvel at the splendour of the cinematic James Bond, as two agonic masters of plunging down the slopes. Lastly, in light of the above, we conclude by discussing how Paltrow’s case was won.

Dioramas and diagrams

The quotidian understanding of the term ‘diorama’ might associate it with taxidermy installations at natural historical museums. However, with the literal meaning of ‘seeing through’, the optic device of the diorama was invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1839, 75–79) and popularised as a form of display of two-dimensional paintings via an apparatus that created the illusion of change and motion, usually in a landscape. Transferring this proto-cinematic meaning of diorama to the animated ski crash intimates that something pivotal has gone missing in static installations: the shifting relation between spectators and the artful object, and the temporal as well as spatial dimensions of something that moves or changes shape. By drawing on the 19th century diorama, we reframe the Utah trial animation as an instance of representing movement and change. The cases introduced for comparison—esports, professional alpine skiing, and action movies—are noteworthy here in that they imply ideas of movement, which can both be seen and executed in moving images. But they also show the degree to which movement can be planned and thought of beforehand (which seems not to be the case of Paltrow and Sanderson). For this reason, we need to complement the diorama with a theoretical companion, namely the diagram.

The diagram was developed as a philosophical concept by Gilles Deleuze (2006, 31–51), drawing inspiration from Michel Foucault’s analysis of the penal system (Foucault [1975] 2002). The concept denotes an abstract function which allows for the passage of actual functions between different systems, or, in Deleuze’s citation of Foucault, a ‘functioning abstracted from any obstacle or friction’ (Deleuze [1986] 2006, 42; Foucault [1975] 2002, 239). For instance, in the diagram termed ‘Panopticism’, seeing-without-being-seen is such an abstract function which lets the penal law and the prison to perform a similar function, although being different systems; and it can pass over to new systems, such as the self-regulating practices of a disciplinary society: ‘In this way, the diagram is not merely a model that traces similarities between things, but is also a generative device that continues working once embodied’ (Zdebik 2012, 5). The diagram is here usually employed to describe forms of power (sovereignty and discipline), but ‘power’ can take many forms. Agonism is itself a diagram—the Greek diagram, says Deleuze ([1986] 2006, 108): a contest (agôn) between ‘free agents’, which makes the domination of others turn into a domination of oneself (self-care, exercise, askesis).

More generally, the diagram ‘describes the flexible, elastic, incorporeal functions before they settle in a definitive form. The diagrammatic process could be imagined as a physical state or system being atomized into incorporeal abstract traits and then reconfigured into another state or system’ (Zdebik 2012, 1). Concurrently, Deleuze suggests that the diagram is an analogue to Immanuel Kant’s concept of the schema (Kant [1781] 1998, 239–247; [1790] 2001, 253–256). As the diagram describes pure relations of forces or ‘the emission of pure singularities’, the schema describes the relation between spontaneity and receptivity, i.e. the relation of forces that make us pass from power to knowledge; this is something which makes something happen—makes us see and hear, for instance (Deleuze 2006, 88). This brief analogy has caused some to attempt more in-depth assimilations between Deleuze’s diagram and Kant’s schema (Zdebik 2012, 109–149). For the purposes of this study, such an assimilation would stress the parts played by imagery, imagination, thinking, and judgement with regards to the diagram.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant devises a ‘schematism’ in order to explain how the mind understands things by the power of judgement, when general concepts cannot be applied to particular objects (Kant [1781] 1998, 239–247). Understanding would be a matter of subsuming an object under a concept, which we can do when there is an empirical homogeneity between them—in Kant’s example, ‘roundness’ is a homogenous quality in a circle and a plate. But pure concepts of the understanding are transcendental and have no such homogeneity with the empirical: categories such as quantity or causality cannot be identified with specific things. Therefore, there must be some third thing which is a ‘mediating representation’ (vermittelnde Vorstellung) between such categories and the phenomena that are our access points to the sensible world. These third things are what Kant calls the transcendental schemata. Now, while the transcendental categories are the main issue, Kant’s passing reference to the dog (Kant [1781] 1998, 242) indicates that schematism also concerns general kinds of all sorts, where the problem becomes to determine the relation between the general idea of a thing, which has no empirical existence, and the particular thing, which does exist. The concept of the dog is a ‘rule’ for the imagination to follow to specify a certain four-legged animal. The schema here stands for the abstract idea of a kind, and schematism serves to subsume the individual under the general. As representations, schemata are different from images but have an essential relation to them: it is only through the latter that images become possible; schematism is the procedure by which imagination can generate an image for the concept.

Critiquing athletic movement in moving images, we will have to distinguish between the image as medium (in visual media in general) and imagination as medium (in the context of the diagram or schema). This is because in Deleuze’s exegesis of Kant, imagination is already a medium. Deleuze ([1963] 2004) holds that for Kant, human understanding is a legislating faculty, which constitutes the laws to which phenomena are submitted, and also institutes itself as a power to judge according to these laws. In brief, understanding judges and submits the phenomena to its laws; this submission implies a mediator, namely imagination: imagination mediates between the phenomena and the understanding, in an operation called schematisation. The schemata of the imagination are not themselves images but ‘a spatio-temporal determination’ which corresponds to the category in general, or ‘spatio-temporal relations which incarnate or realise properly conceptual relations’ (Deleuze [1963] 2004, [1983] 1999, 28–29). Schemata are conditions under which understanding can form judgements with its concepts, Deleuze says, but the imagination only schematises in the interest of the legislating understanding. Then, if the diagram is to be understood as similar to the schema, the diagram would be something through which imagination mediates between the fields of phenomenal reality and the conceptual judgements of human understanding.

For our purposes, we appropriate this concept of the diagram (informed by schematism) to signify the ideational prefiguration of an act—in this case, particular forms of movement. The diagram is the abstract function of a movement which can take some actual form or other, but which exists only virtually in the imagination. Downhill skiing, which is the sportive type of movement in consideration here, has the general function of something like ‘getting-down-the-slope-by-sliding-on-snow’, of course, but as a sportive diagram this function is stylized as abstract potentialities (a zig-zag pattern of movement through which the diagram is embodied, for instance), which vary depending upon the individual sport. You don’t get down the slope in any way possible (there is a difference between the possible and the potential); there is an idea of a certain way of doing it which is formalised by the rules, the ‘laws’, of the sport (the sportive function of the general glissade). Imagining the run is therefore tantamount to thinking that idea, to have some notion of the right moves, as a matter of reason.

This is where the schema or the diagram comes in. The downhill racer prepares by imagining the form of an ideal run according to the parameters set by the sport, usually adapted to the actual conditions set by one’s own physical shape, the environment, etc. This creates an individual diagram as a plan of an ideal execution—in other words, a forethought of a formalised function, a ‘mapping’ of potentials (or ‘a distribution of singularities’ [Deleuze [1986] 2006, [1983] 1999, 80]). Once the run is over, its actualisation can be traced as an image which represents or recreates the process of the execution; such a retracing of the real act, an afterthought of the form taken, through which the run is understood and can be judged, is the diorama. Through the image we look back and ‘see’ (understand) the procedure and the result through which imagination was embodied. While the diagram is analogous to the schema of imagination, allowing a determining judgement of the meaning of the category or kind (What kind of movement is this? What is it to get down the slope?), the diorama is the form of reflective judgement which is analogous to the concept (This is how they did it! Look what happened!). The diagram mediates the general idea or concept of the type of movement by outlining its figuration according to the rules of the sport, whereas the diorama mediates the sense and value of the actual movement by tracing its effectuation in view of the situation.

In the following analysis we shift between 1) images of alpine sport as a general kind of movement, 2) judgement of movement in images, and the value-laden meanings they elicit, 3) how images and their agonic meanings depend upon their mediality, not least digitally and cinematically. As we shift from one extreme example of how agonism is constituted out of alpine sport in the case of the trial, to another extreme example in the guise of James Bond, lingering in between on two actual varieties of downhill skiing, each heading in the analysis below will have a pendant in the form of quotations from the author Ian Fleming’s musings of how Bond fared on snow in an early novel (Fleming [1963] 2012, 201–225). These are early tidbits of alpine analysis, which conceptualise evaluations of ski slope movement, here to become imagery.

Paltrow v. Sanderson: “Bloody Snow”

Celebrity trials perennially create media attention, and with developments of new media, new forms of distribution and reception add to the circulation of imagery, soundbites, and text captions. The #metoo event included, perhaps most iconically, the Harvey Weinstein trial, when female film stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Rose McGowan, Daryl Hannah, and Uma Thurman accused the Hollywood mogul of sexual harassment (Franssen 2020, 257). The contemporary media landscape admits full coverage of such melees, which, in turn, effect polarisation in the internet populace, not least in the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard defamation suit of 2022. The sides taken in any given case then connect with other trenches of contemporary cultural warfare, actualising issues and concerns of class, race, sex, and power. Celebrity trials are also a dispute of the ‘image’ of the persons involved, and they can be humiliating and humbling affairs. Glamorous stars, known from their turns in motion pictures, descend to humdrum venues shared with the everyman, and these events are also caught on film, albeit more lacklustre ones. The dramatic mise-en-scène we associate with celebrity figures is withdrawn and supplanted with other forms of spectacle: those of the jury trial and the trial by media, when lawyers as well as memers add layers to the media compound. The special case that we will turn to offers a display of such a complex instance.

The case is this: In February 2016, actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow went for a skiing holiday with her children and those of her new boyfriend. There, in the slopes of Deer Valley Resort, Utah, an encounter took place, the unfolding of which came to trial in a civil courtroom in the same state seven years later. Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist, claimed to have been injured badly in a collision with Paltrow, and consequently sued her for the incident. Paltrow responded by countersuing Sanderson: he demanded $300 000 (reduced from his initial claim for $3,1 million), while Paltrow went for a miniscule, symbolic $1. On 31 March 2023, the verdict was in: Paltrow won her suit, while Sanderson lost his.

The trial triggered massive media interest and can still be seen in an array of clips on platforms such as YouTube. As Sanderson himself bitterly surmised to reporters after having lost the case: ‘I’m gonna be on the Internet forever’. In fact, the case played out in social media as well as in the courtroom, with stakes much higher for fame or infamy than for the fortune sought; and in this respect Paltrow, no less than Sanderson, had her own trial of public opinion. Certainly, the public persona of Gwyneth Paltrow is high-profile in terms of cultural struggles that media today reinforce and thrive on: social class, whiteness, gender, and mothering (cf. Charlesworth 2014, 509; Graefer 2014, 108–113, 119–120). The stage was set for discrimination. But those qualities came in the guise of Paltrow’s calm, cool, and collected appearance. In contrast to some of the extravagant, if not vulgar mannerisms of Sanderson, Paltrow’s displays came shrouded in quiet luxury attire. With her ‘stealth wealth’ (Helmore 2023) clothing and sombre manners, Paltrow was initially an easy prey for memes and satire in social media, making fun of her out-of-touch elitism, sometimes with a populist anti-Hollywood slant, sometimes with a tinge of misogyny. But at the same time, she instantiated an element of tragedy, a pathos for the fault by which the noble may fall, in this case as victim of an opportunistic fortune hunter.

Media also played a decisive role during the hearings, in the courtroom itself. A certain GoPro-film (supposedly existing but not found) was mentioned by Sanderson and his defence as hypothetically providing the most accurate representation of the event, but it could never be presented to the court. Instead, the computer-generated film, with its visualisation of the fateful collision between the recreational skiers, became the primary exhibit. Paltrow’s legal team had the animation created by Mountain Graphix for the purpose of demonstrating her account of events, with Dr. Scher as the bemused narrator. It is this film that offers us a ‘diorama’ of the events—both of the collision and of the trial.

The animated diorama is a depiction of what objectively was perhaps a not so dramatic turn of events, in spite of Sanderson’s theatrics. It shows the two figures moving slowly on the snowy slope, crossing each other’s paths, getting entangled, and falling in a heap on the ground. There are two perspectives: in the first version, they approach us from the back of the slope, falling down in the foreground; in the second version, we see the interaction from the side. In both, their animated avatars move stiffly and clumsily, almost like stick-figures, with little sign of athletic flair. The banality is evident—but what is it evidence of? For Dr. Scher, it demonstrates the kinematics and biomechanics of the entanglement, which implies the decision of guilt: Sanderson is at fault, hence the ‘crime’ is his. But something else is also at issue here, namely the cinematics of the reconstruction, where mediality implicates itself into the diorama as the events unfold.

The concrete properties of the actual, singular entities in question, i.e. the recreational skiers, are highlighted in the diorama, showing a version of how they are making their ways in the world. The animation makes it possible to trace the actual movement as a scene. Connoting her actress background, one might imagine Paltrow depicted in this way in some pre-viz for a hypothetical film scene. But then, this would have been a diagram—a prefiguring of the events, a planned development of something to realise. Now, it is a diorama—a tracing, after the fact, of the real movements, formalised or stylised for demonstration and assessment. The cinematic properties are significant, but also ambivalent. On one hand, the animation allows movement not only in but also of the diorama, making it possible to change view and to cinematically pinpoint in detail certain events: to pause, replay, zoom, change angle, etc. (It thereby goes several steps further than the infamous handling of the Rodney King film.) On the other hand, the actual effectuation of moves and gestures would arguably have been more accurately represented if the fabled GoPro-film had been existent, as a cinematographic documentation POV-style; we are now left with its simulated trace, ‘post-viz’-style, as it were, but based on a testimony and in that sense still subjective. (Indeed, the animation was explicitly presented as support to the testimony of Paltrow’s children’s ski instructor Eric Christiansen, which Sanderson’s lawyers objected to by claiming that it lacked ‘foundation for trajectory, speed, and direction’, but they were overruled.) The lack of a subjective POV, which would provide a semblance of objectivity, is supplanted by an objective-looking overview, based on one subject’s memory of the events.

The term ‘objective’ also actualises the materiality of creating moving pictures. Given the understanding of ‘objective’ as the assembly of optical technology that bundles light to project an image, it is not hard to accept the allegations from Sanderson’s defence that the diorama doesn’t produce accurate imagery representative of reality. So, one dimension of contest when judging movement in moving pictures is the struggle for objectivity in relation to footage. Based on a subjective experience, the diorama was accused of lack of objectivity. The alleged GoPro-footage would on the one hand qualify as subjective (since such cameras are attached to one person filming what he or she sees), but on the other as objective, since its optical technology doesn’t program what it displays. Hence, in the ideal case, subjective testimonies benefit from imagery gathered from mechanical optics. However, as was evident in the case of Rodney King, once moving images emanating from mechanical optics make it to court, both sides can refer to and tamper with the exhibit. And of course, we should note that subjective mediation goes both ways: the Sanderson side went for another form of expression altogether, opting for a histrionic testimony of being hit forcefully to the sound of a ‘blood-curdling scream’, which he attempted to mimic in the witness stand, making jazz-hands for further effect. Out of court, as Paltrow’s lawyer indignantly brought up during their examination, Sanderson described Paltrow as a ‘King Kong coming out of the jungle’ and as ‘Godzilla’, using film references that made her play the part of the beast. That Sanderson submitted such cinematic hyperbole only underscored the ludicrousness of his hypocritical charge against Paltrow.

Seen from the viewpoint of diagrams, however, we are left with no clues. The thinking and planning of movement rather corresponds to what Paltrow said she lost in the process of the trial: ‘Half a day of skiing’. If all that was planned was a day of skiing, the laborious, mediatised reconstruction of a thoughtless, accidental event seems excessively thought through. The CGI clip, with Dr. Scher’s complex commentary, along with the reactions in the digital agora, form the lion’s share of thinking about the movement of the event. Since the diagram is altogether missing, the diorama creates an imbalance in the judgement of movement; Dr. Scher’s slight smirk swells from this lopsidedness. In what follows we will inquire into what happens to the conditions when they are inverted: when the planning of the form of movement is so elaborated, so ‘prejudiced’, that there is not much space for reflective judgement.

World Cup Ski Racing, FIS: “Downhill Only”

In an attempt to catch up with digital zeitgeist, and to jump the esports bandwagon, the international ski federation launched a short-lived smartphone game in 2020 for both Android and IOS: World Cup Ski Racing, FIS. The game was made by the independent Canadian publisher Session Games, which stands behind a handful of other titles portraying different sports, such as basketball, American football, and skateboarding. In 2021 a virtual championship, ‘Road to Cortina’, was to be held as a digital running mate to the actual penultimate competition of that season in Cortina. As of 27 December 2023, Session Games’ web page advertised the game by its accuracy to portray reality, taking place at ‘Actual World Cup COURSES’, and making it possible to acquire ‘Authentic SKIS & GEAR’. Suffice to say, the game was no blockbuster. The app isn’t available anymore, and upon visiting Metacritic, a website that aggregates reviews from the whole Internet, as of 27 December 2023, not much is said about the game, which signals a modest interest in the title.

Focussing on the visuals, the view is adjusted to the standing format of smartphones and the action is depicted as if shot by a flying drone camera, following the run downhill. The skier is seen with the last 30 metres covered on top of the screen, 70 metres slope of him/her, and around 20 metres to each side. Tracks from old runs could be seen in a soft grey shade. When competing against people who have chosen other nationalities than you, your tracks are shifted to a 20 metre long, pointy pennant with different motives that you unlock and purchase in the in-game shop with its authentic goods. Surrounding the screen, different stats are visible at all times of the run. On top left a national flag is seen next to a counter keeping track on how many gates have been passed correctly.

Here movement is idealised; the body of the skier is very small on the screen and is restricted to three schematic positions: upright, tilted right, and tilted left. Being played on a smartphone, the game has crude controls, making it possible to govern your avatar downhill with only one thumb (even if some commenters experiment with two digits). As experts on sports games, the publisher’s programmers and animators are well prepared to plan movement, which in the case of WCSR, FIS leads to the construction of a perfect diagram. The authenticity is surficial and superficial, only to be found in the actual courses and realistic equipment, and not at all in the athletic body, neither in the stale scheme of the avatar, nor in the single thumb governance of the action. The complicity of the diagram overshadows any possibility of a diorama to emerge. Judgement of the movement being enacted is hardly worth the effort, as we see it reduced to lines being traced on the screen by a finger. Actual assessments seem instead to concern the game itself, judging by some snarky remarks found on social media, and the fact that the game is not available anymore. Perhaps this demonstrates a misjudgement on the part of the producers as to the nature of the sportiveness of esports: that it is not realised in the idea alone, as a perfection of the ideal form of its ‘laws’, while not allowing for the actual thought to take place in embodied movements. All images that are present on the screen are in some sense pre-programmed in the diagram and not real dioramas of an event.

So, as a simulation of alpine athletics, the moving imagery of WCSR, FIS never came close to the attention that the likewise poor show of Paltrow’s computer graphics sparked. Is it purely chance that both these animations of alpine sportsmanship seem to evoke unevenness between the diagram and diorama—of judging movement before and after? The Paltrow ski trial CGI exhibit demonstrated an excess of diorama in the lack of diagram, while the WCSR, FIS esport example demonstrates an excess of diagram in the lack of diorama. Too much thought was needed to analytically discern the meaning of the one event after the fact, while too much thought was put into the construction of the setting for a meaningful act to really occur. After these two examples of simulated excess, we will now move on to cinematic footage of mastering the snow, to see what such images might convey and what judgement can be induced from more or less live action.

Mikaela Shiffrin: “…the joy of speed, technique, and mastery of the snow”

As a 17-year-old freshman who won her first World Cup in Åre, Sweden in December 2012, downhill skier Mikaela Shiffrin was asked by a Swedish public service broadcasting journalist how she pictured the race beforehand—what went through her mind? ‘I wanted to try to fly’, Shiffrin replied. When the reporter offered that she had succeeded, she responded: ‘I think so’. On the face of it, this is a clear statement of the relationship between the diagram and the diorama: a thought beforehand of the ideal form (an idea of the function as ‘to fly’), and then an afterthought of how the real movement took form (how the execution relates to the plan). It is worth noting that Shiffrin, with telling precision, does not say ‘Yes, I did!’ but ‘I think so’ (italics added). It is not a matter of her experience while performing the run, in the midst of seeing it through, but rather an assessment of the performance in relation to the mindset, now that she (and we) can see through the run, looking back, comparing the diorama with the diagram.

Even if Shiffrin is more elaborate in her idea of the movement beforehand—and indeed more distinct in the execution of the run—compared to the clumsy Utah colliders, movement still seems elusive to the minds on record. Surely, the images from Shiffrin’s descent to the vale (and concomitant ascent to the stars) contained a decent amount of time spent in the air, but quantitative measurement is not the real test of her flying. What do we really see in the diorama, as Shiffrin thinks she flew?

We see the skier leave the little starting shack, viewed from the right-hand side of the skier, who then sets off in the distance; the viewer follows her back as her figure recedes from a semi-drone-like view (depending on the steepness of the course). A threefold sequence then commences: angle 1 shows her from above (like WCSR, FIS, but closer) making undulating tracks in the snow while shaving the gates directed downwards in the picture (on her way to the part-time measurement position); angle 2 shows her passing the part-time measurement position, but now from the side; angle 3 admits the viewer again to see her becoming smaller from behind in her pursuit to forcefully descend the mountain. The closing sequence is twofold: angle 1 shows her from above, coming towards the viewer, cutting to the goal line, from which the camera is shifted to one standing on the ground, towards which she approaches while slowing down.

It takes a medium of a seeing-through kind for a diorama to appear, whether we talk of fin-de-siècle smoke and mirrors performances, modernist taxidermy installations, simulations, or cinematic footage. In the case of Shiffrin, the diorama largely relies on the development of sport photography and the particular ways in which professional downhill skiing has evolved. It takes a skilful judgement to establish a diorama of the kind that switches between being close to the alpine athlete and being given the overview, both of the run and of how it quantitatively relates to other runs. But it also takes judgement to evaluate the events in this very much programmatic unfolding of sequences: where is her centre of gravity, how economically does she crouch, how wide is she taking the turns, and (for) how long does she fly? And now we have only thought about the judgement of the ones making the diorama possible, and of those witnessing it.

At the end of the day Shiffrin herself, and her likes (if not peers), have the most important say in this. So, what does she say? That she wants to fly. This is the diagram. All her preparations, analyses, and judgement—all non-flying practices—are a part of a plan with the purpose of attaining and conveying flight. Because of this diagrammatic form of action, she is then able to win. When she is asked if she were able to fly, and responds that she thinks so, this is an attestation of completing a diorama that corresponds with a diagram. The clip that we watch, as an audience to her execution of her plan, is the tracing of an idea of getting down the slope in the form of a body thinking it can fly. In Shiffrin’s conception, the general diagram of the sport of downhill racing has been transformed into a complementary diagram of flight, which overlaps the actual, physical performance with an idea of the movement, allowing for an ultimate prowess in the sport. Thinking that to slide down on snow is the same as flying is an agonic idea of outperforming the competition; perhaps her competitors precisely do not (think to) fly.

With more poise between the two judgemental interfaces of diagram and diorama than the former alpine athletic simulations, let us now shift to more dire alpine imagery, featuring James Bond, to see how this medial representation of careening towards ground level, like a fatal projectile from a smoking gun, stands in comparison to the other dioramas.

James Bond: “…like a black bullet on the giant slope”

Bond began his extravagant foray into the world of alpine sports in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Hunt 1969). In his attempt to escape the clutches of his nemesis, Blofeld, who resides in a mountain-top lair at a Swiss ski resort, Bond grabs a couple of skis from the ski-room and straps them on. We see Bond readying himself by the doorway before taking off in a manner similar to professional downhill racers à la Shiffrin; then a cut pulls us back down the slope to see Bond beginning his run. Thus far, the imagery is rather like the standard aesthetics of a TV presentation of competitive downhill racing: from proximity with the athlete in the booth before the take-off, to a spectator view at a distance as the run gets going. But as Bond is quickly spotted by Blofeld’s guards, the scene gears up for a chase rather than a simple race.

Action ensues, with fast-paced cross-cutting between Bond rushing down the steep slope with multiple villains in hot pursuit, machine guns blazing. The shaky camera confers a feeling of spontaneity or rawness, immersing us in the action quite differently from the studied, objective views in TV broadcasts of professional skiing. Several eye-catching stunts, like jumping over rocks and crashing through trees, lead up to Bond losing one ski but still carrying on at breakneck speed, until he uses his remaining ski as a weapon to beat down an opponent. Ultimately, the run doesn’t end with the skier crossing a finishing line at the foot of the slope; instead, Bond crashes down by a precipice, opening to a veritable abyss, where a physical confrontation with two henchmen takes place. Victory in this case is marked by Bond throwing them off the cliff to their deaths. Unlike the sportive runs—both in the physical performance and the esport simulation—there is no fixed piste with measured intervals and clearly delineated finish lines. It is as if Bond as protagonist must ‘think on his feet’ in order to momentarily determine the best course of action. However, this fiction of spontaneity rests upon the fact that the ski chase scene in actuality was very well planned and rehearsed: a lot of thinking beforehand had to go in for the scene to appear to show Bond thinking on his feet.

The Bond franchise has often returned to snowy slopes for the purpose of staging action scenes. In For Your Eyes Only (Glen 1981), significantly, there is a series of transformations of alpine sports, beginning with leisurely skiing but set within a narrative frame of Bond battling it out with the villainous, skiing champion Erich Kriegler. Bond sets off on skis through the woodland, heading for an appointment, but is intercepted by Kriegler shooting at him. In the melee, Bond loses one of his ski-sticks and must continue with only one, as the drama ramps up with the addition of two more goons on motorbikes. The loss of one stick only causes Bond to accelerate, gaining the force to leap into the air and rotate his body, using the spin to strike the gun from a villain’s hands with the skis. In this first instance, leisurely paced skiing rapidly changes to violent acrobatics as the action scene unfolds.

Preparing for the next transformation, Bond seeks refuge in a throng of people gathering in the tower for ski jumping. Shots follow one ordinary man doing a ski jump, establishing the normal form from which Bond seems destined to deviate. When it is his turn, Bond is joined on the course by one villain who smashes into him and makes him fall, but he quickly gets back on his feet, and the two men complete the jump, side by side. Once they land, Bond swiftly returns the favour by pushing the goon down. That ski-jumping is introduced as a new form of alpine athleticism further stresses the acrobatic nature of the race, while the excitement of the action is ironically offset by the comical impact on the sets of tourists which the antagonists traverse, while the ski jumping mutates into a downhill race.

The next transformation is even more excessive: bobsledding is abruptly introduced into the mix. While a team rushes down the bobrun, Bond jumps into the course on skis, now without any stick at all, and Kriegler, in turn, follows Bond on motorbike. So now we have the bobsleigh doing the regular bobsledding, Bond emulating bobsledding on skis, and Kriegler (the champion skier) emulating bobsledding on motorbike. It is like a thought experiment: what type of athleticism with what type of equipment typical for what kind of sport can do the best type of glissade? It is not just that we witness an agon between the protagonist and the antagonist; we also see a manifest competition between sports in performing a certain action.

These examples reveal what happens when the agonic element in competitive sports is foregrounded to an extreme degree. With Bond, sport is an instantaneous appropriation of the capacity for action that the sport provides. This is conditioned by the overall narrative structure of the films, where sport is essentially dramatic. So, to the diorama and the diagram we must perhaps add a third form: the drama. Drama offers a transitive fluidity of action across diagrams, and it transforms the diorama. Drama is the form which allows experiments with sportiveness. Bondian sportsmanship consists in a transformation either of or between sports when they are swept up in the action. Sports can transform in sequence or transmute in leaps, depending on how acts relate to the drama that plays out and to the changing milieus that the action traverses. All sports are virtually action sports in Bond films, due to the confrontation between the violence of the agent and the force of the urgency which keeps pushing any sport to the extreme.

What is striking in the Paltrow v. Sanderson trial—to return to our main antagonists—is that something similar happens there as well. But here, it is not the dramatic context which sets the form of action, but the insistent presence of media (in various forms) which allows for similar transformations. Gwyneth Paltrow uses media in the way that James Bond uses sports: shifting across different media, she experiments with forms of representation that can transform her image. Everything about the actual accident is trivial, including the ungainly performance of the alpine sport by the participants, if it weren’t for the biomechanical analysis of a CGI reconstruction; and everything about the trial would be trivial, if it weren’t for the repeated dramatizations of the event in the witness stand, immortalised by the in-court media coverage, in social media memes, etc. The core issue of who did what kind of skiing on the slope has its sportiveness virtually erased in the juridical proceedings. This is ironically indicated both by Sanderson’s missing GoPro video and by Paltrow’s famous declaration that she ‘lost half a day of skiing’. What we do lose is the skiing. What we gain is the proliferated, protean image of stealth agonism: an iconic case of winning the media race uphill.

Conclusion: Gwyndicating the glisserati

Visual material is selective. The canvas or the camera was brought there deliberately with a particular purpose in mind. With the occasional exception of horse or racing accidents, very few pictures offered a less pleasant view of sport. Within the culture of visual representation there is an ever-increasing pressure to be extraordinary, interesting, and exciting. Sport’s appeal has always been in part the excitement it generates, and the choice and nature of visual coverage helps us to unpack how the excitement of sport is being conceptualized by the creators (Huggins 2008, 325, italics added).

Above, four different sources of alpine agonism are analysed visually with the aim of laying out a framework that enables the understanding and prediction of aesthetic/judgemental rhetorics of movement in moving images. We will begin by discussing them in relation to the concepts of ‘diagram’ and ‘diorama’, and then return to the question of what was at stake agonically and dramatically in the case of the ski crash trial. But first, let us dwell upon Huggins’s idea of there being so few instances of ‘a less pleasant view of sport’, partly due to the need for excitement in sport imagery. The example of Mikaela Shiffrin demonstrates a near perfect example of aesthetically pleasing harmony between the professionality of the sportive execution and the professionality of the media representation, each masterfully following the conventions of the game and the medium, respectively. The example of James Bond even more forcefully illustrates the capacity of a sporting activity to generate excitement—at the cost, of course, of outdoing the confines of the sport as such. However, the analysed animations (Ski Crash Trial Testimony & WCSR) are not particularly aesthetically pleasant, while technically proficient. But while the esports instance apparently failed to establish a sustained interest in the product, the collision animation, even more aesthetically drab, continues to beckon viewers and commenters on sundry social media. So, we have a less pleasant view of a sport in the form of the fallacious movement, but one that keeps the excitement intact, perhaps for ethical reasons.

The clumsy recreational skiers Paltrow and Sanderson, whose collision was digitally recreated for the purpose of the trial, represent the mundane reality of sporting performance by the average person—only bizarrely highlighted due to the celebrity involved. We would otherwise not pay much attention to such performances, though we might ourselves participate and be guilty, so to speak, of similar ungainliness. Compared with Paltrow and Sanderson, the other examples represent various forms of perfection: ideality (World Cup Ski Racing, FIS), professionality (Mikaela Shiffrin), and exceptionality (James Bond). Esports skiing such as WCSR lays out an ideal diagram of a downhill course, in order to trace runs that can compete for the best result, by abstractly emulating real world competitions in a virtual form. Shiffrin is an example of what the game emulates, but now showing an actual, physical exertion, really confronting the materiality of natural elements, however manipulated and prepared for the purpose of a competitive sport; and Shiffrin’s professional performance demonstrates excellence that is documented by statistics as well as the camera. Bond, lastly, is a creature of the camera: a fictional hero whose runs have little competitive purpose, if not transformed into violent conflict, and whose prowess is performed by actors and stuntmen, enclosed in a plot and enhanced by cinematic means. With the Paltrow v. Sanderson incident all these layers of reality, virtuality, and mediality are meshed: real skiing by an actor (not performing as an actor while not being a real athlete) is digitally reconstructed, and this CG-imagery is circulated in a media landscape that forms a court of public opinion. The simple act of skiing is in the process turned into a game of winners and losers, a competition in the form of conflicting perceptions of reality and status—an agon of icons.

Now we can see how the diagram and the diorama connect. Dr. Scher’s smile revealed that there was an imbalance between the two, leaning heavily towards the diorama. The other simulation analysed, WCSR, instead displayed another unevenness, tipping to the diagram. On the contrary, Shiffrin’s pursuits are ones of a successful balance between our analytical poles. The ideal for traditional sport to function, then, is that diagram and diorama are represented in equal measures. Sport seen in this way—i.e. as a closed universe of media outputs depicting the execution of planned movement under semi-uncertain conditions (and completed with a large audience consisting of assigned witnesses)—then appears as the arena par excellence for the judgement of movement.

James Bond is a more complex character with regards to how diagrams and dioramas are presented. As long as we see Bond actors and stuntmen successfully gliding downwards, as material film products, we could be following a diagram similar to a recreational skier, but with a more schematic diagram: they know what they are doing. The diorama aligns with this but visualises it in a style similar to the media representation of professional skiing: they know what they are showing. However, as soon as violence enters, the diorama starts demonstrating transformation. This happens because Bond reacts to his alpine antagonists by altering his diagram, mid-slope, from one of escapade to one of battle: he becomes a bullet, flying as Shiffrin, but defeating his enemies literally and physically, whereas Shiffrin only symbolically (by temporal measurement) defeats her competitors.

We do not judge Bond’s movements as we do Shiffrin, because he does more than what he sets out to do. With him, the diorama shows transformative experiments with diagrams, a flexible rethinking of what is the right move in the present circumstances, making him pass from sport to sport, in the passing from sport to war. Shiffrin wins by mastering the correspondence between diagram and diorama; her triumph comes from performing the sport according to the ideal form of its function. With WCSR, there is only the form fit for the function—the diagram as determinism. In comparison, Bond wins by mastering the very passage that the diagrammatic function allows, passing transformation onto the diorama; in excess of function, there is no one form, only transformation. Finally, in the case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, we see a mastering of dioramatic information, a reflexive judgement effectively counteracting the lack of diagram, which serves to simulate the power of a function out of the workings of pure form. Let us phrase this in terms of a Kantian critique of aesthetic judgement (Kant [1790] 2001, [1781] 1998, 47–260): WCSR is agreeable, Shiffrin is beautiful, Bond is sublime, and Paltrow is good. But in what way, more exactly, is Paltrow (ethico-aesthetically) good? What is the moral of the imagery?

In sum, the computer-generated diorama of that quotidian collision on the Utah mountainside reveals the farcical element of the whole process: awkward digital avatars of the well-to-do in pizza positions, low-speed entanglements ending in spooning, the high-end resort downgraded to a generic backdrop—all reflective of the base absurdity of the court case. If there was one run that actually succeeded, it was Paltrow’s gliding through the different forms of media: from her silver screen persona and her online lifestyle brand, to a live-streamed trial and an animated visualisation, which midst all the farce generated an image of dignified innocence and female vindication for social media memes (‘We are all Gwynnocent’, ‘Gwyndicated’, etc.). As James Bond excels by transforming the diagram while in action (in the drama), Gwyneth Paltrow excels by transforming the diorama which re-enacts the event. The process demonstrates a mastery of image-making in a media ecology where control of representation is difficult to attain. Ironically, Sanderson’s accusation of Paltrow being ‘out of control’ on the slope has a side of truth which excuses her: while she takes control of the court case through a cinematic device, the re-enactment of the maladroit skiing in the animation only lends humility to Paltrow’s persona. Reduced to a pixelated avatar, the star finally became human. Movements really are meaningful, which moving images can display for us. In the shifting between contexts and images of the analysed cases, we discern a rhetorical repertoire originating from the aesthetic/ethic discussion in sport philosophy multiplying and qualifying for a general discussion of the construction and perception of imagery in our image-laden culture.

This was a case of image on trial, rather than any real investigation into a crime. Beforehand, Paltrow was guilty by image; in the end, she was innocent through imagery. In a mov(i)e that affected public opinion as much as the juridical outcome, Paltrow turned the trial in her favour: from a case of resentful commentaries on the female film star as a self-absorbed, privileged white woman, to one of inculpable kinet(h)ics—showing us how to slide the slippery slopes of the media landscape and its moral optics. That is one radical glisse of the glitterati! In the diorama, demonstrating a gwyndication of the rights of women, we see a shift from misogwyny to gwynethics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).