Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued
Ben Flanagan on Julian Castronovo's bedroom film noir.
We return to VOLUME 21: The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend 2025. You can read the entire issue here.
Today, Ben Flanagan introduces Julian Castronovo’s feature, which is now on release in the USA via Memory. Check for screenings.
We’ve all heard of bedroom music, like that made by Frank Ocean or Claire Rousay. Small productions that use pre-loaded effects and inventive melodies to tap into the emotional core of pop music. But how about a bedroom film? Julian Castronovo’s self-consciously first film Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued has an inauspicious $900 budget, a paucity of settings, and no other on-screen actors. It also has bottomless invention and imagination, a quasi auto-fiction that signals new limits to documentary storytelling.
The film begins with the camcorder-captured image of a slender figure tying their hair back and walking through a field, while oversaturated Godardian colours waft across the screen. This sequence will recur; every time it conveys something different to the viewer, with its final iteration bearing the cumulative weight of each that came before it. En route, listen out as the entire film is narrated in a flat, British monotone—you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be AI, but it’s an actor listed as Philippa James. This voiceover begins telling the mystery of the filmmaker—who is Julian Castronovo beyond the disconnected images he shows us: Vape pen, iPhone case, and then matchsticks and diaries? And why would he be the subject of his own film?
Then, Debut delves deeper into the stuff of film noir. First, a mysterious letter is delivered to Castronovo’s New York apartment. Narrative space is taken up by femme fatales past (his ex, who has absconded to Europe), present (the unknown woman who penned the aforementioned letter), and future. His apartment contains physical and spiritual secrets, eventually leading Castronovo to uncover a tale of assimilation and historiography in the figure of one Fawn Ma, whose life-story becomes a welcome plot thread. Soon, he’s driving around LA, even visiting Raymond Chandler’s grave. All the while, he hits the vape like Bogart with another pack of Chesterfields.
This detective plotline occasionally takes a back seat. There’s also an amusing thread of film industry satire, as Castronovo suffers various setbacks alongside a hapless producer as they attempt to get the very film we’re watching made. At one point you wonder, how on earth are they going to turn this spiralling cold case into true crime? But it’s not long before another lead turns up, pulls Castronovo to Europe, and even further down this Creepypasta wormhole of a conspiracy.
This resourceful dedication to getting the film made recalls the master, Orson Welles, whose F For Fake (1973) is given a narrative hat tip when Castronovo uncovers an art forgery ring. And this story, which Castronovo has confessed is a fabrication, is just as lucid and essayistic. With abandon, he throws the viewer into a saturated montage constituent shots of telephone lines and Fortnite clips, split screen information, chopped and screwed Burt Bacharach. His skillful juxtaposition of image can be notably seen in when the voice over (written by Castronovo) says ‘he is by many accounts handsome, charming, and witty,’ only to cut to him tearfully showering in full Joker makeup.
The usual mode for Castronovo’s self-portraits is webcam footage of his face, seated in a single space, keeping the entire body separate so as to limit the viewer’s comprehension of him as a moving being. We see him whole only when rendered in CGI as a blurry avatar. And then there’s the debris of the title, seen in an ever-moving slideshow in the form of a low-quality jpeg of his medical records. For a film that’s so seemingly personal, so about the self, it keeps us at a distance, constantly making the viewer aware that their experience is being mediated through camera and mechanical devices. It’s a wispy thing, as though we are watching Castronovo become a cryptid in front of our very eyes.
By the time we reach the bottom of it all, the screen is filled with darkness, streetlights captured as little more than drips of paint. These ever-descending mysteries resemble a typical post-modernist arc in which a search for sense and meaning is thwarted by befuddlement. Think of Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño, Jaques Rivette. But it’s the mixture of sly genre with experimental technique which makes Debut into such a thrilling artefact of our times, the kind of ideas that could only have come from a bedroom, perhaps directly from Castronovo’s dreams.