Julian Castronovo’s DEBUT or
Objects in the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued

The process emerged from the idea that the film would generate itself if it were built around objects, said Julian Castronovo in the Q&A that followed CJLC’s screening of his feature film, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. The usage of objects to uphold the skeleton of the narrative is a tactic frequently employed by novelists to link discrete sections of the story, with the aim of coherence. One famous example: Joyce’s Bloom keeps forgetting about the soap he bought for his wife until he sits on it in his back pocket over and over again. Indeed, Castronovo discloses that in the production of his film, he took inspiration from fiction, namely, Don Juan, whose frame narrative he borrows. 

The film follows a fictional Castronovo character who becomes invested in the disappearance of an art forger, the previous tenant of his apartment. He follows a series of clues (signs; the film is explicitly interested in semiotics) to solve the mystery on a trajectory that begins in New York and moves to Los Angeles before ending in Europe.

Debut is Castronovo’s first feature film, premiering last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam to critical acclaim. Its North American premiere was instituted by the Museum of Modern Art, and the film has been shown at festivals internationally.

So how is it possible to organize a film made in 2025, during the age of computational capital in which the dematerialization of the world and everything we value is taking place, around objects? Whereas the commodity had previously been restrained to a material dimension in the object produced by the laborer on the factory floor, as media theorist Jonathan Beller posits, a contemporary analysis of informational capitalism expands/collapses the commodity into the image-commodity. Images, or rather, arrays of images, mediate the relations in the original formula of capital, M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney prime, or M after the sale of C], resulting in a a modified formula of M-I-C-I’-M’. Any interaction with images, which are tied to computable information, generates more data, and therefore capital.¹

Thus a film organized around objects must be composed of pastiched digital images. There is no filming in the making of Debut, save for the clips of Castronovo playing his autofictional character on his Macbook photobooth application. Some of the visuals are animated sketches, some are screen-recordings, and some are simply photographs that have been photoshopped onto a blank background. These images are often layered, or are moved across the screen in a way that makes their digitality, or their digital production, obvious. 

This film provides a stark contrast to contemporary projects shot on 16 millimeter film that attempt to retain a material feel. This is sometimes compelling, such as in the case of Duane Linklater’s deeply materialist work following the movements of Indigenous peoples and their contemporary expressions of traditional activities, such as hunting in the tundra. Most of the time though, 16mm is used for the purpose of nostalgia only, which is dangerous– nostalgia, after all, is one of the aesthetic tools of fascism.

It is fitting that Castronovo’s film invents such a digital form that emerges from compressed old forms, as the themes it negotiates surround questions of artistic production, identity and the construction of the self, and the presence or absence of meaning; in other words, questions that interrogate culture. If we think about postmodernism as the final subsumption of the cultural by the economic through the situating of culture as a site of production, resulting in visual culture, then Castronovo has done a great postmodern job with Debut. In making the viewer aware of the replaceable, programmable Image(s), he prompts an evaluation of its functioning and affective capabilities.

Though the film does the job of addressing the condition of the contemporary fragmented and disembodied subjectivity, it remains attentive to age-old questions artists have always posed. It feels achingly tender, still simply human, and the viewer, like the narrator of the film, begins to feel empathy for Castronovo’s character in his floundering for certainty, his hopes that he may learn something about himself through another. And as is the case with every artist, there is still that desire to create perfect beautiful images that unite the faculties in harmony. 

To return to the question of narrative, it figures clearly in this film as an organizing structure, yet simultaneously becomes less important as the film progresses. Fawn Ma, the art forger, becomes less of the object of interest whose truth must be exposed, but more so an avenue for Castronovo to act out his artistic drive and learn about his own identity. One of the first clues he finds about Ma is her signature, written in Chinese, which he posts to the Chinese social media platform WeChat to ask about its meaning. This short moment reveals that Castronovo himself is Chinese but disconnected from his ancestry, since he does not know how to read the language, an experience common to children of the diaspora. It is also a subtle signification, obvious perhaps only to those who share the experience and (problem of) mixed-race identity, such as myself. This approach to identity mediated through imaged distillations of the projection of a more authentic (read: mainland Chinese), but still mythic figure (art forger, existing in the present only through traces) is at once refreshing compared to usual treatments of Asian American identity, and reflective of the experience of constructing selfhood in an age where coherence, originality, and individuation are impossible. We must rely on others if we want to create meaning, as the response to unprecedented distributions of networks of control is also in new modes of relationality centered around collectivity.

As someone who studies literature, I have been asking myself what the place of the novel is in contemporary visual culture. A refusal of narrative feels reactionary, and in the face of capitalist appropriation and erasure of our modes of being, an outright rejection of old forms and history seems an acceptance of defeat. Instead, like Castronovo shows us, we should think in terms of reconfiguration. We can keep narrative as a frame and an organizing structure. The narrative carries the film along, but it’s not altogether that important. What’s important is the whole assemblage, and its consistently moving parts.

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Jonathan Beller, "Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital,” from The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism, Duke UP, 2021.