The doctoral dissertation examines the transformation of documentary at TV Ljubljana and TV Slovenia between 1958, when TV Ljubljana started broadcasting the programme, and 2011. In doing so, we analyse three aspects, namely production, text, and audience, as such an approach has been at the forefront in recent media studies, with a new and interdisciplinary scientific field of media production or media industry that emphasis on the connections between production, text and audience (Holt and Perren, 2009; Meyer, 2012, Cottle, 2003, Mayer, 2009, Caldwell, 2008).
Television became the dominant mass media in the 1960s, in Slovenia it hapened later, as the start of Slovene television broadcasting is dated in 1958, and to which Slovene documentary production resorted because of the poor financial situation in national film production. With the documentary production the public television could carry out its public mission, but the genre began to change in the 90s, due to the changed media situation and commercial television stations, when new types of shows or new approaches in the use of documentary arose (Kilborn and Izod, 1997, p. 20).
In the dissertation, we define the television documentary based on fundamental theoretical concepts (Nichols, 2010; Bordwell in Thompson, 2010; Bondebjerg, 2003; Kilborn in Izod, 1997; Šprah, 2010; Aufderheide, 2007), which are not uniform or differ in the fundamental categories of documentary film as a genre, style, type of artifact or merely a specific way of filmmaking (Kilborn and Izod, 1997, p. 15).
In researching the production, we rely on the production and archival documents of TV Ljubljana and TV Slovenija, as well as six semi–structured interviews with documentary filmmakers and managing editors. We identify three main periods of the development of documentary film: the first period that saw the establishment of documentary film as an extension of news broadcasts (19581980), the second period with the rise of documentary film and the Ljubljana School (19811990), and the third period with the revitalization of documentary film and co–productions (19912011). In the first period, the documentary was developing mainly within the current affairs programming and dealt with current events. Numerous series that were more manageable from a production standpoint were produced in this context. In the second period, professional standards were established in the production, journalists began to work with directors and write scripts, and The Ljubljana School of Documentary film was established, and especially the »Dokumentarec meseca« series demonstrated high standards and originality. In the third period, the field of creative cooperation was expanded to include many coproductions with independent producers, which brought a wider creative impulse and variety of topics. In all periods, both TV Ljubljana and TV Slovenija, were plagued by numerous problems, from financial, personnel and production issues, which is why the makers of documentary always created within the bureaucratic and inflexible limitations of production capacities, time, and financial limitations. For each of the three periods, we analysed two documentary films and showed how the production conditions were reflected in the text, film form, style (Bordwell and Thompson, 2010) and modes of representation (Nichols, 2010).
Since the 70s, the television medium has also implemented audience research, since the audience is a factor of uncertainty for the medium (Ang, 2012, p. 315), mainly through the barometers of viewership and listenership that at the time served to management and politics, and mostly informative content was under scrutiny. A turn in the institutional perception of the audience occurred with the arrival of commercial tv stations in the 1990s, when TV Slovenija began to lose its monopoly, and at the same time it was fighting for marketing revenues, as the fees alone were not enough to produce all shows. Documentary filmmakers initially did not think about the audience in the creative process and mostly relied on intuition (Hagen, 1999, p. 133), but they classified their audience as more educated. Later, they felt the pressure of ratings, which are provided daily from AGB Nielsen measurements. However, under the pressure of ratings, the schedule also changed and after 1993 was clearly oriented towards information and entertainment. With this, the documentary began to lose, in 2011 the most important documentary series, »Dokumentarec meseca«, was discontinued, but the reasons were multifaceted, among other things, the production of documentary films was influenced by the ZSFCJA Act, which financially devoured the in–house production of the Culture and Arts, even though it was supposed to ensure content enrichment.
The dissertation shows that between 1958 and 2011, TV Ljubljana and TV Slovenija were important producers of documentary that reached a wide audience.
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