FTS123: Nation, Cinema and Capitalism Sample Paper
This essay, “Bio Royale: Foucaults’s Bio-Politics in Battle Royale” (PDF) was written for FTS123: Nation, Cinema and Capitalism. The FTS123 course fulfills a D2 requirement and is one required for FTS majors, so it is fairly representative of the core of the film and television studies program at UVM. The course was taught by Professor Hyon Joo Yoo, a faculty member in the department who specializes in the study of global cinema and theoretical work with gender, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. This essay was written for the final assignment in the class, which was very open: create a critical essay utilizing theory and method we studied and a foreign film of the writer’s choice. I chose Michael Foucault’s body politics and the Japanese film Battle Royale.
The open ended prompt is not uncommon within FTS, where much of the focus is in understanding a theoretical framework and applying it to analysis of a film. Thus, I utilize a framework of theory to make an argument about the film, which I state as a thesis and provide evidence for throughout the paper. Citations have been omitted to avoid plagiarism, but were done in MLA as is standard for writing within fields like English and FTS. Several sections have also been eliminated from the essay for this reason and are signaled by ellipses. The coherence and flow are not the point of this sample; rather the idea is to learn some of the structural elements and ways to write in the genre of film analysis.