Essays from the inaugural Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand conference (2016)

The essays gathered in this issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema are selected from, and broadly representative of, the methods and topics brought together at the inaugural SSAAANZ conference. Collectively, the essays speak to a broad conception of screen studies and diverse critical concerns across film and television exhibition and reception, documentary film, pedagogy and screen culture. Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams’ article analyses the cultural history of Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Tessa Dwyer offers a detailed examination of the acclaimed television series Top of the Lake and the role cultural specificity and the authentic voice play in the context of transnational television. Simon Sigley investigates cinematic shifts in how Western Samoa was represented in three feature-length documentary films. Produced by the National Film Unit (NFU) of New Zealand between 1947 and 1962, the films cover a period during which ‘Samoa was administered as a United Nations (UN) trust territory by the New Zealand government’. Derived from a primary survey, Toija Cinque and Jordan Vincent’s article investigates the use of smart TVs and broadband-enabled mobile media devices for the viewing of movies, television programs and documentaries among other forms of screen content, often concurrently with social media devices, to understand audience practices in an increasingly fragmented mediascape. Vejune Zemaityte, Deb Verhoeven and Bronwyn Coate draw on big data in relation to feature film screenings and box office figures to interrogate the ‘10 per cent rule’ – the often made, but untested, claim in industry discourses that the Australian market represents 10 percent of the theatrical market for Hollywood films. Focussing on both Australian and US screening data from 2013, the article compares the popularity of selected American films in both the Australian and US markets to ‘contrast the differences that emerge in terms of distribution and exhibition’. Finally, Mark Ryan examines the pedagogy of screen content in undergraduate Australian screen studies courses. Together, the essays collected here provide a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of the research from the inaugural conference of Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and anticipate its second conference, The Uses of Cinema: Film, Television, Screen, Monash University, Melbourne, November 21–23, 2018.