Ella Kitchens, Editor-in-Chief
Jacob Bates ‘29 didn’t expect to end up in the historical film industry, but he always loved stories of the past. Now, he has written and directed two films set during the Civil War era.
His career first started with an interest in history from a young age.
“I started out with a Civil War reenactment,” said Bates. “You recreate a person from the past, so I was a little drummer from Connecticut. And I started meeting a lot of fascinating people in this hobby.”
At a reenactment, he met his first mentor, Will Eichler, who was a director of the show “Chicago Fire.” Eichler showed him “the path towards becoming more professional.” Inspired by him, Bates began posting historical music videos, narrated videos and short documentaries on YouTube when he was about 10 years old.
“I realized people my age didn’t care about history, didn’t know anything about historical music, and I wanted to share that with my classmates,” he said.
He continues to share the past through the films he makes now. Since coming to Denison, Bates shot films “Fair As Linen” and “Killed at Resaca.”
“Fair As Linen” follows young Union soldiers from Connecticut who are imprisoned in Confederate Lynchburg. Bates shot the film in Virginia, invited by another mentor, historian and director Greg Starbuck. While Bates initially expected to only have one camera on his shoot, other cameramen asked if they could join while he was filming, resulting in the use of four cameras.
“It’s just totally through kindness and really wonderful people taking a chance on me,” said Bates.
Both films were intended to be short films, but by the time they are complete, both may be considered feature length films. Bates said this is due to the ability to shoot far more than he initially expected.
Bates is currently editing “Fair As Linen” and said he hopes it will be out this summer. “Killed at Resaca,” was filmed at a Civil War battlefield and a 19th-century home in Gettysburg, and was based on a short story by American Civil War veteran and author Ambrose Bierce.
“It’s about really the horrors of war and where masculine ideas of glory can lead one, and the overall cost of dangerous masculine ideas,” said Bates.
Denison students Ian Kiesel ‘29 and Jon Foster ‘29 both played a part in Bates’ productions. Kiesel served as the director of photography for “Fair As Linen” and Foster as the second assistant director for “Killed at Resaca.”
Bates emphasized the kindness and generosity of everyone who helped him out on both of his films.
“That’s the most beautiful thing about this art,” said Bates. “Cinema is the most collaborative art form, period.”
In all his work, Bates focuses on the experience of young people in war, something he believes he’s capable of as a young person who has immersed himself in history.
“We’re at this age we can accurately portray the experience of youth,” said Bates. “Because of my years and years of studying and kind of living this period, and also being a young guy, I’m able to write this dialogue in what I believe is a truthful way.”
He and his friends have even started talking in more formal language and grammar, “old-timey dialogue,” so that when he writes his scripts, the 19th-century language flows naturally.
“I find you elevate yourself by enhancing your own grammar,” Bates said. “And we’re here to learn. So it’s fun to aspire to a higher standard there.”
When he’s writing, Bates said he asks himself, “What would two young guys be talking about?” Through those conversations, he wants to show that humans of the past are just like us.
“These are young people,” Bates said. “Just as you can see them on this campus, but they’re in the middle of these situations where people are being blown apart. They have the same wants and desires and hopes and dreams that people do now.”
Bates said that this specific type of tragedy in warfare was often lost in military movies that focus more on the tactics and explosions of war.
“War is the most extreme thing in human experience,” he said. “Pulling on that is a pretty fascinating example of the worst and best of humanity.”
He said that studying war also has taught him a lot about kindness, both in his filmmaking and his everyday life.
“Through everything I’ve studied and warfare and history in terms of learning who we are as a people, it seems to me that the greatest thing we can strive to do every day is to be just and kind to people around us,” said Bates. “I don’t have time for unkindness.”
A challenge of Civil War filmmaking is the reality of slavery and how to portray the Confederate side. In “Fair As Linen,” while telling the story of Union soldiers imprisoned in Lynchburg, Bates said it would have been “very easy to totally demonize the Confederate guards and make them a one-sided bad guy.”
“But we wanted to allow everyone humanity,” he said.
During a scene where a Union soldier is killed, Bates instructed the actors playing Confederate guards that he wanted to see shock and horror on all of their faces. He explained that many of these guards would have never seen a dead person or been to battle before, so their reaction would be shocking and emotional.
“In old Hollywood movies, it’d be all stoic,” he said. “But you’re not just this angry stoic bad guy. You’re a person too.”
He also worked to accurately portray the horror of African American slavery, a key part of the Civil War era.
“These enslaved people are trying to get by every day,” he said. “They’re trying to live their own lives and not be punished… We have to explore what it looks like for a human being to just try to survive.”
In “Killed at Resaca,” Bates portrayed racial injustice in the Union Army through a Black Union soldier played by George E. Edwards.
“Some characters treat him with indifference,” Bates said. “Some treat him as he’s a person, but others do not.”
Bates always put his best effort into getting every detail right of the historical events he depicts.
“What you need to do for an epic story is narrow it down to the intimate small moments and tell the stories of these people in a way that’s respectful and reveals the humanity of us all,” he said.
Bates compared what he does, replicating an entire other world on screen, to the ability to time travel, and emphasized how important it is for us to look at our past.
“Studying the past I think can only help every person to find a brighter future, to find more joy in every day. It’s vital for all of us to understand because we mustn’t recreate the problems of the past,” Bates said.
The glorification of war, or “the devastating idea of glory,” is one thing that Bates hopes his films warn against.
“The mid 19th-century in America and right now are far more comparable and similar [times] than [they] may seem,” he said.