As a child in Chiba, Japan, Moeko Fujii spent a lot of time watching old Hollywood films with her grandmother, who was a big fan of Elizabeth Taylor.
"One of my first memories is of the 1963 'Cleopatra,' watching Elizabeth Taylor roll out of a red carpet," Fujii said.
Watching those classic films gave rise to her own passion for Hollywood film, which eventually led to an appreciation for film noir.
"In the 1930s you had Peter Lorre playing this Japanese detective called Mr. Moto, but he then later reappears in noir as a much more racially ambiguous person," she said. "Part of my fascination with noir is it takes an Orientalist obsession with the Asiatic, and transforms it into something different, something much grittier and new and modern."
A new assistant professor of film and media studies in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Fujii is channeling that enthusiasm into courses on film noir, makeover narratives in Hollywood films, and the aesthetics of skin and surface in film and literature.
Fujii earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University, her M.F.A. from Columbia University, and her B.A. from Harvard College. Her criticism on film and photography has been widely published in major publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Aperture Magazine.
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Fujii sat down with Yale News to talk about Hollywood film noir's fixation on the Asiatic, the aesthetic of found footage films, and her favorite baseball team.
| Title | Assistant professor of film and media studies |
|---|---|
| Research interest | Intersections of film theory, aesthetics, and race and gender studies, with a focus on 20th-century American film, literature, and visual culture |
| Prior institution | Princeton University (graduate student) |
| Started at Yale | July 1, 2025 |
Tell me about your research interests.
Moeko Fujii: My work is in thinking about racial logics in American cinema, especially in Hollywood film noir. In early Hollywood, you see an intense fascination with Chinese and Japanese objects on screen, as well as with major Asian American stars like Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa. But by the 1940s, after passage of the Motion Picture Production Code, those bodies essentially vanish from noir, even as the aesthetic obsession remains. This corporal disappearance invites us to shift our understanding of Asian American racial logics away from visibility or invisibility and toward visuality - the way the "Oriental" body disappears in order to emerge as form, as cinematic infrastructure: lighting, framing, camera work.
In my book "The Asiatic Logic of Film Noir," I'm thinking about the Asiatic not as decoration but as a technology of noir film. Scholarship on noir and race has largely centered on blackness or whiteness, but many noir films are profoundly invested in imagining how the Asian American might be folded into the imagination of the U.S. national body. I'm theorizing that logic to show how what seems to exist in the background or behind the camera is, in fact, the very surface that makes the visible - and the human - legible.
Do you have another favorite film genre?
Fujii: This isn't a genre, but I love a good makeover film. The makeover sequence - its orchestration of "before" and "after" - is so distinctly cinematic, as opposed to painting or theater. Our relation to bodies and social legibility - how we see what we see - are negotiated and renegotiated through montage, framing, costuming and light. What interests me is how makeover films often reproduce a conservative logic: the conferral of social and cultural capital onto subjects who are made newly "readable" within dominant norms. Running alongside this is a more ambivalent current: a keen sense of loss entangled with finding a self through style, a compromised attachment that the films obliquely register.
You write a column for Orion Magazine on film and the environment. Tell me about a recent topic you particularly enjoyed.
Fujii: I wrote an essay on media about cryptids. In order to convince someone that a monster like Bigfoot is real, the found footage film needs to follow a particular pattern. If there is studio lighting in a cryptid film, for example, people wouldn't believe that it's a cryptid sighting. They would think it's a hoax, a suspicion that this kind of media can't quite shake off. There's something about the jarring and shakiness of the cryptid video that makes it look very suspicious. But on the other hand, it's precisely that blurriness and shakiness that has a claim toward truth, because, the thinking goes, a cryptid wouldn't be able to be found otherwise. I linked that aesthetic to a bunch of found footage films in contemporary Hollywood film, including "Paranormal Activity," "The Blair Witch Project," and "Cloverfield."
What do you like to do outside of work?
Fujii: I watch a lot of movies! I find the screening culture at Yale so vibrant. There is a material infrastructure here that makes a screen-loving culture possible. Undergrads have the opportunity to go to a lot of different screenings every week, and that's not something that you find at a lot of universities. And being able to watch a film together on a screen makes it so that the students turn to each other after and talk about it, which I think is its own form of criticism.
I also watch the Hanshin Tigers, a Japanese baseball team which my mother and grandmother support rabidly. Two weeks ago, I was up at 4 a.m. watching the Japan Series [the Hanshin Tigers ultimately lost to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks].
