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From the archives

When Terror Came to Canada

The response to the FLQ crisis remains controversial five decades later

A Neglected Pledge

Moving beyond apologies

The Nobel of Numbers

How a Hamilton native played mathematical peacemaker after World War One

Geoff Pevere

Geoff Pevere’s latest book is Gods of the Hammer: The Teenage Head Story (Coach House, 2014). He is the program director of the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival in Toronto and is currently at work on a book about the mythology of rock music.

Articles by
Geoff Pevere

Ageless Gags

Revisiting the artistry of silent comedy July–August 2015
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

Determined Mavericks

Making independent movies is a never-ending struggle against the Hollywood machine. April 2012
“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…

Back to the Garden

What is vernacular culture and do we really want it? January–February 2011
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

A Billion Clips a Day

The clamorous mix on YouTube constitutes a genuine communications revolution. May 2010

The Post-Celluloid Era

Is Tinseltown really about to disappear from our cultural radar screens? Not likely. July–August 2007
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…