Once every three months, Pages convene for a TED Talks-style summit during which a handful share stories, experiences, talents or opinions of personal significance with the rest of the Program.

I seized the opportunity to illustrate my ongoing passion for Harry Potter with an all-new angle: the PageTalks coordinator, Jeff Gordon, asked us presenters to teach something. So I did. Rather than recapping essays, I challenged myself to use Potter as an example for why and how we can (and should) study movies as works of art akin to masterful paintings. It’s easy for me to describe this and that quality of the Potter movies; it is quite another to come into the room with an agenda of convincing a room that what seems like frivolous pop culture is actually enormously culturally and historically significant.

In my talk, I described the first opportunity I had to learn about art itself as an academic subject. My freshman year of high school, my world history teacher showed us a picture of Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul on the Way to Damascus. She explained why the framing of the painting was revolutionary, why the colors and lights contradicted established norms of the time and how the brilliant Caravaggio used these techniques to conjure emotions other painters never had.

I showed that painting to my peers, then took them through some of the ways in which we can talk about movies in similar (if not the same) terms. I compiled a clip of all the cuts in the Mad-Eye Moody classroom scene from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and used it to show how rapid cuts and widely varied angles can have deep emotional resonance. I noted similar technical elements like lighting and composition, and I asked my peers to take a step back with me to broaden our understanding of what art is worth studying. Although that shift in perspective took me many years to accomplish, there could be no better reward than sharing that love—the deep passion at the heart of my fascination with Harry Potter—with my peers.