The article is aimed at enumerating the barriers to cooperation between audio-visual communications specialists and formal historians in Lithuania in the 1988–2005 period, determining preconditions for overcoming these stumbling blocks and demonstrating the gap between these two spheres plus the consequences of its narrowing for audio-visual work. Documentary films and documentary-type cultural programs in which recognizable historical reports are discernible and which were made in the 1988–2005 period were used to achieve these aims.
Stumbling blocks for historians preventing cooperation with audio-visual communications specialists are held to be the following: an arrogant position on the part of academics in regard to mass media, the inappropriate application of scientific standards in judging | 
dizainas ir programavimas giriaus