Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower (Ryan Ferko, 2019) (Patreon)

Ryan Ferko has presented a number of films in festivals past, although those previous entries have been co-directed by Faraz and Parastoo Anoushahpour. They are both listed in the credits of Hrvoji as collaborators, but Ferko is credited as the sole filmmaker, and this in itself is intriguing. Although the trio's films have been quite impressive, I have always detected a sense of formal modesty in their work, a tendency to downplay their presence in the face of the cultural subject matter before them. With the new film, rhythm, editing, and sound design are front and center, offering the viewer a more refracted perception of the environment on display, and I think this makes for Ferko's strongest effort yet.

Hrvoji consists of sequences shot during Ferko's travels throughout the nations of the former Yugoslavia, a topic explored in his previous film Strange Vision of Seeing Things. In the new film, Ferko organizes the material through shape first and foremost, beginning with a tall rock monolith that becomes a literal touchstone for other vertical forms throughout the film. At other times, we see wide shots of movement through fields -- guys playing football, birds in the sky -- and these varying compositional structures alternate with broken interiors, criss-crossed with shafts of light that mirror the solid forms seen elsewhere.

Ferko is in a sense playing with the coupling and disunion of the former republics, cutting them together through montage (and through his travels) but arranging them in a way that emphasizes discontinuity. Sound design works to underscore this, with tracking shots matched with the noise of table tennis, or roving landscapes combined with a man talking about his love for the music of Leslie West and Mountain. In terms of shot composition and organization, Ferko displays an influence from certain key modernist masters, such as Cy Twombly, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr. But there's a bold, original voice that comes through in Hrvoji, perhaps more clearly than in any of his previous films. This is a work that feels so exacting that even the hand-held trembling of the image seems to bolster the overall formal agenda of the work. An impressive achievement.