Journals Showcase (Witryna Czasopism.pl)

Tomasz Kulicki used the picture of the Polish society staring at their home TV sets as a point of departure to a broader reflection on the condition of a nation facing new media and presented it in the article Przyssani do ekranu (Glued to TV) in “Obywatel”. Translating the figures provided by the market research company 4P Research Mix into the reality of everyday life, one can feel really horrified by the picture one gets. We are a human mass weakened by the TV’s entertainment and information stream, which for an individual means being mentally and physically passive and for a society entails homogenization and making our perception and interpretation of the reality infantile. All that foretells that apocalypse is near.

Łoziński in his latest documentary How to Do It? reveals the secret of how to make a “politician” from scratch by means of socio-technological publicity stunts. At the same time, he is discrediting a part of the Polish political scene. Darek Arest, the reviewer of How to Do It? in the December issue of the “Film” movie magazine, was right when he said that in a few years time – when the film is no longer new and fresh – it will turn out that best political films are always apolitical. The director himself emphasizes the universal quality of his film, summarizing it as a story about temptation. Łoziński represents a group of ‘directors-therapists’. He may be favor a shock therapy treatment, but then again – who said that the job of an artist is to color up the world and feed audience pretty pictures that are false.

It is good that Jacek Dehnel has found a shelter with “Studium”. He is going to run a column Fotoplastikon (Peepshow) that will enable him at last to make an inventory of family mementoes – photographs, postcards, oil painting reproductions and engravings – probably there is loads of them in his drawers. It is even better that the editorial team does not make allowance for the award-winning poet, collaborator of “Studium”. In the same issue Marta Tomczyk asks Dehnel and Dehnel’s poetry several vital but inconvenient questions: “When reading for the first time I find the choice of vocabulary striking. A tendency to use archaic words that are bizarre and rarely used (…). A taste for language bizarre effects and archaisms introduces a question about originality and his own poetic language.

Hołówka poses many questions and we cannot expect any comment from any politician, not to say about a politician who would answer these questions actually. Therefore, Hołówka asks if politicians can behave seriously, he asks what we can actually require from them, who is to blame for this situation and finally about the level of our awareness – do we know how political parties organize themselves, what rules govern them, does anyone supervises political parties and their authorities, who exerts influence on the political programme, etc. Finally, Hołówka asks: “Maybe we are to blame? Maybe we choose our leaders irresponsibly and uncritically?”

Drinking beer with somebody doesn’t mean that we get to know which of their customs corresponds to our straw figure representing winter, symbolically drowned during a folk ritual in celebration of the coming spring. But we will know which kind of beer Jihn, Taeko or Herman like most, what they think about after drinking it or if they like “missionary” position. It’s a bit like we have finally stopped perceiving this world, which is new and outer for us, as an open-air ethnographic museum, ethnographic funfair or an old lady with beard stirring sensation and we have perceived at last that there are people in this world – some of them completely different from us, others similar – and decided that our experiences and observations, even if they are not true, are not objective and based on shreds of information, they are at least equally important as the objective truth we craved for so far.