The article is a discussion with Dionisios Sturis’ reportage book Nowe życie. Jak Polacy pomagali uchodźcom z Grecji (New Life. How Poles Were Helping the Greek Refugees), especially with the parts where Sturis draws a historical parallel between actions of Polish People Republic’s authorities from late 40s and early 50s – who decided to harbour the children, civilians and wounded partisans from Greek home war – and current ones, who refuse to accept the nowadays refugees from Africa and Middle East. While the author is aloof to the rhetoric which presents the former ones as a guiding light to the latter – as Sturis used to do – he still claims that the book could serve as a tool of empowering anti-xenophobic and inclusive ‘policy of hope’ (according to Rebecca Solnit’s notion).
The compositional manipulations (literary, film and theatrical) that disturb linearity of the story can be removed in procedures that order the reception of the film. The reader or viewer can put his or her own story in the 'right' order - using the logic applied in solving a riddle. However when the disturbance does not lead to the mixing of elements of the story or obscuring information, but is there to introduce disorder and lack of agreement inside the story, the receptive combination often proves to be insufficient. Therefore, in order to organize the narrative one needs to apply interpretation. Jakubowski demonstrates this using the example of Luis Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, a film in which the director asked two different actresses to play the lead female role.
The aim of the paper is to critically analyse the documentary series Wracajcie, skąd przyszliście [Go Back to Where You Came From], broadcast by the commercial television station TVN in December 2018. The people participating in the pro-gramme were supposed to represent/embody the polarised opinions of the Polish society on (accepting) refugees, so they were according to the “three for/three against” model. The group, together with Piotr Kraśko who conduct-ed the programme, visited refugee camps and centres in Germany, Austria, Serbia, Greece and Iraq to confront their opinions with the people they met there. The declared aim of the programme, in fact, was to find an answer to the main question: should Poland accept refugees or, as the title says, should they go back to where they came from?
The article contains two parts. In the first, the Author describes the theoretical background for analysing the photographs by an American controversial artist – Joel-Peter Witkin; the analysis is carried out in the second part of the paper. The realistic, authenticity-oriented visions of W. Benjamin, R. Barthes or S. Sontag are confronted with Witkin’s creativeness spirit – clearly manipulating in matters of the order of reality (and its rules of appearance) and photographical stuff. This attitude is supported by François Soulages’ views on aesthetics.
The aim of this article is to critically analyze the internet’s remixes of Nilüfer Demir’s photography showing the dead body of Alan Kurdi – a 3-year old Syrian refugee – found on the beach near Turkish city Bordum. The main question here is: how the convergence culture ‘regards the pain of the other’ and deals with it? Semiotic analysis of chosen examples leads to a conclusion that while some artists undertake a specific visual tactics of protest and objection, more often, and even in clearly critical pictures, the ‘rhetoric of consolation’ is a predominating one and serves to both artists’ and viewers’ complacency and consoling. Terror of the pain and death is deleted from those images and replaced by cheap and idle tenderness or even kitsch.
This article is a follow-up of the essay Alan Kurdi’s Online Resurrections published in the previous issue of the ‘Cultural Studies Appendix’ (3/2016). This time the author analyzes the remakes of the widely shared shot of Omran Daqneesh – a 5-years old Syrian boy sitting in the ambulance and fully covered by dust with seeable traces of brushes and stains of blood – taken from the viral footage which reported damages and sufferings caused by the airstrikes on the Syrian biggest city, Aleppo, during the civil war. For once the author discusses not only the visual rhetoric strategies applied in those remakes, but also their ethical dimensions, especially in reference to the category of ‘unrepresentability’ connected with the concept of the ‘limit situations’.
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