A controversy

Film and television

On a generic question concerning the Croatian evaluation audio-visual production

Unhappy with the fact that their TV-documentaries constantly fail to beat more »film-oriented« documentaries in the competition for the prizes awarded at the Croatian Festival of Short Films, a number of authors demanded that a new category be introduced in the Festival, that of the television documentary.

The functionalistic approach to generic questions connected to audio-visual genres (opposed to the universalistic approach) allows for the formation of separate, more journalistic genre/type of documentaries, but since film and television are separated both by communicational and the structural differences (the second type of differences often resulting from the first type), it seems quite obvious that »television documentaries« could hardly make the appropriate programme for a film festival. For, regardless of the often involuntary technical choice between filming and taping, and regardless of the fact that a television network may be the producer of an item of the film festival, it is the aesthetic criteria based on the century of film that the critics or/and the jury of a film festival will rely on. A good television show may very well be a very poor film (although a good film will usually make a good television broadcast), because the looser demands that television makes on viewer’s concentration often result in the structure too loose to be acceptable for a good film. Consequently, even the best »TV-documentary« can be a very poor documentary film.

Nikica Gilić