As Bates has learned over the course of his teaching career, students are often “not much more open to history than they are to old films.”  Thus instead of trying to lecture students on why specific films were so meaningful during the time they were released, Bates attempted to come up with an innovative way to relate students to the historical context of the films they are watching.  Over time, Bates developed and polished a teaching technique in which his students discover the significance of films through writing and self-reflection.  His main assignment consists of three major essays: Essay 1 “asks the students of identify a film that had [a] powerful resonance for them and to account for that response historically.” Essay 2 – the “vertical study” – has students choose a film that was perceived as a major “event” for audiences of the past and develop a theory on why the public responded as it did.  Essay 3 – the “horizontal study” – encourages the students “choose three films that have something in common,” but also span a historical gap of at least thirty years.

            By completing these assignments one after another, Bates’ students learn to define the historical significance of any given film first by thinking critically about how films as a medium affect their own lives and then extrapolating those feelings onto an audience in another time and place.  As an example for his students, Bates contextualizes the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, by discussing his personal encounter with the film as a young viewer 1969.  At the time, Bates explains that he was an eighteen-year-old student with a low draft-number that would likely send him to Vietnam once he graduated from school.  Upon watching the film, Bates instantly identified with “Butch and Sundance’s irreverent defiance of authority,” and strongly sympathized with their “frustration and few over the relentless pursuit of [their] faceless posse.”  The violent conclusion of the film, however, only served to “confirm [his] fatalism: like Butch and Sundance, [he] could defy authority for a while…but ultimately [he] didn’t stand a chance.”