The way mantis shrimp see is nonetheless super cool and interesting. They likely have no conception of 2D color at all, and can only sense the 12 different colors in general. Furthermore, only the midband of their eyes see color, when the eyes are moving and scanning for prey, they don’t see color at all, which probably helps offload mental load for their small brains. Once they do see something, they then stop moving their eyes to determine the color of what they’re looking at.

Also, mantis shrimp have 6 more photoreceptors in addition to the 12 colored ones, to detect polarized light. They likely see them the same way that they see color, so they probably don’t consider them anything different than wavelength which is what we interpret as color.

Ed Yong’s An Immense World has a section on this and I’d highly recommend it. The ways animals sense and perceive the world are often so different for ours and it’s so fascinating.

I’d question the underlying assumption of your question - were indie films more thriving in the 70s compared to today? Indie films today are certainly thriving - there are more of them than ever, distributors such as A24 make them widely known and they also grow organically online as well. Most cities have small film festivals that indie films make the circuits in. Oscars are now being won by indie films instead of blockbusters. That doesn’t mean they are profitable though which was the topic of the OP. I don’t think indie films were particularly profitable in the 70s either though?