Geoff Pevere

Instinctively, we all know what’s funny. If we’re not laughing, it isn’t funny. The same thing goes if someone else is laughing and we’re not. It still isn’t funny. Funny is as incontrovertibly subjective as a quirk of sexual attraction or the taste for boiled cabbage. It is all in the response: our response. My …

“I stuck a camera in the middle of the street and just shot people.” Reflecting on his origins as a film maker to the Vancouver movie critic and journalist David Spaner, the African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger) taps the very heart of the so-called “independent” movie-making…

Some 30-plus years ago, the filmmaker (now Queen’s University professor) Clarke Mackey began a six-year stint as a preschool instructor. It made a deep impression on him. It convinced him that children exist in a fleeting state of grace when it comes to unfettered creativity, and it put him on the path—a long but determined one—to the eventual writing of Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st …

One need not venture far into The Decline of the Hollywood Empire before stumbling across the first exclamation mark. It is right there, at the bottom of the first page of chapter two: “Digital distribution,” writes author Hervé Fischer, “will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood empire: two giant steps forward for film in one fell…