Students who took a deep dive into special film topics this summer found themselves immersed in the world of A24 and indie films. Over four weeks, they explored the role of the production company within American independent cinema history and how it has evolved into a production powerhouse, creating popular films like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Past Lives, and Midsommer.  

Pate Duncan, a Film Studies graduate student in Communication Arts, created this new course to help students view films they may already be well acquainted with through a new lens.

The course was broken into miniature modules, each one resulting in students watching four films per week. The broad course concepts moved from introducing “indie” as a concept, to exploring indie auteurs, dissecting different genres like post-horror, art cinema, and French film, and finally examining how identities are represented in the genre. Starting with historic indie films like Metropolitan and The Squid and the Whale, students broadened their understanding of the history of what makes a film and “indie film.” As they moved through the concepts, they applied their learning to contemporary A24 films like Spring Breakers, Lady Bird, and Moonlight.

Students got exposure to various indie film concepts through a variety of texts, many of which were published by Communication Arts affiliates, including the late professor David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Professor Jeff Smith, and graduate student Max Kaplan. They then got creative and demonstrated their understand through concept maps.

“That was probably the marker of being a successful instructor,” Duncan said. “The concept maps showed how students were making connections I hadn’t thought about and were real evidence of them taking the concepts and making them their own.”

Duncan highlighted the challenge and nerves that went into teaching a new course focused on a topic that so many students are familiar with.

“I don’t want to be redundant and talk to them as if they’ve never heard of these things,” he said. “That’s humbling as an instructor because I also get to learn from them in ways I wasn’t expecting.”

Moving forward, Duncan is excited to be teaching Communication Arts’ Horror Film class this fall and interacting with more students who bring their unique views of media into the course concepts.

“In Communication Arts, we all work in moving images and media in really interesting ways,” he said. “I hope students can see how these concepts all connect and what the important differences are between all the stuff that we do.”