An anecdotal location...
The producers have done a terrific job which enabled us
to go in turn to almost all the key places related to Joe Hamman, Paris and Camargue,
of course, but also to Normandy.
When we arrived in Normandy, with my assistant Corentin
Baeumler and our main character Jacques Nissou, spiritual heir to Joe Hamman,
the time was greatly awaited. We dropped our bags in a small hotel between
meadows and rivers, near Pourville, near Dieppe. Immediately, we started
turning sequences that were planned before Hamman’s last home in the village
and by the sea. But rain started to fall, then the sky began to melt, and
finally the entire universe spilled tears on us!
We were soaked and had to stop photographing because we
risked our camera faltering and our technical equipment to break. We took
refuge in a restaurant to get warm and eat. When we returned to our hotel, a
little later, it was our surprise to have to brave the roads which were
semi-buried under mudslides to reach our hotel which was completely submerged
under water! A lake that we had to face
to find our room, luckily located upstairs. So we put on new dry clothes and
dried our equipment and headed for shelter. To recover from all that water, Jacques
Corentin and I drank some good whiskey
to the health of Joe!
Director's words:
The contribution of Joe Hamman in western ...
No other genre but westerns at this point is directly
related to the invention of cinema.
Cinema "was invented" at the end of the Old
West ... and epic Western, the Wild West areas, typical characters (Indians,
cowboys Cows, bandits of this conquest) became the fundamentals of cinema,
which took on its own account of this new odyssey.
Western and film were made for each other ... and they
work wonderfully well together.
When Thomas Edison developed his Kinetoscope (first known
method for recording moving images), he filmed the show of his friend Buffalo
Bill, before filming the show in its entirety. Thus the first visible Indians
in cinema, are real Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation, some of them had
participated in the defeat of General Custer at the Little Big Horn and,
thereafter, participated actively in the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill.
The theaters of the cities of the East Coast were fond of
little scenes evoking the great West and adventurers. The greatest heroes (real
or manufactured) of the Wild West themselves took the stage to hold their own
role in front of decorated box seats: Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Texas
Jack, Robert Ford, and of course the greatest of all these showmen, the famous
Buffalo Bill.
When the cinema fell into place and the Edison
technicians began to realize the first films, stage directors and actors left
the stage to go film in parks and forests near the cities. The result was
pretty poor: landscapes that were unsuitable, actors who were afraid of horses,
accessories and theater costumes that looked wrong ...
Of course at the time, everything from the first western
illusion: in "The Great Train Robbery" Edwin S. Porter, staged ideas
that allowed him to overcome the obvious shortcomings. The last shot of the
film where the actor Bronco Billy Anderson fires his gun facing the camera
caused more cardiac arrests at the time of several projectionists!
Despite the fact that they have everything on site,
Americans curiously merely ignored this kind of filmic statement for their
account of the conquest of the West and the absolute human adventure that it
meant to capture. It is in the West, the adventures lived for real, while in
the East they were playing in plays and where the films were made, it was just
fantasizing this Wild West and the unknown.
To have the taste and smell of the west was enough for
the happiness of citizens. cinema primarily addressed this to the public.
The documentary focuses more particularly on a period
situated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Cinema was learning
to walk; the invention progressing in each film.
Three years after the first western (1903), Joe Hamman
attacked the genre on his return from the United States. It was a "good
western school" since he worked with Buffalo Bill in his show, and lived
with the Indians of Pine Ridge and experiencing adventures by their side.
Returning to France, his trunks were filled with
authentic costumes of cowboys and Indians bought, collected and exchanged for.
His expertise on a horse and the quality of accessories
and costumes he had managed to procure during his stay in the United States
would be the basis for the first European westerns that were not shot in
Germany or Italy, but rather in France!
After a first attempt in the quarries of Arcueil that did
not meet our French Cowboy Joe Hamman’s desires, he found his happiness in the
Camargue. This vast and savage territory was very suitable as an American
desert…
The Marquis Folco de Baroncelli, a strong personality, a
committed man who led an impressive fight for the preservation of their
language, for its culture and its region, who invited Joe Hamman to use his cattle
herd ... It was an extraordinary discovery for Joe...
John Hamman is Joe ...
Joe Hamman therefore saw a unique experience: he shared
many months with the Sioux of Pine Ridge. That is to say, he ate, drank, slept,
and lived like them. He even participated in an attempted horse robbery with a
group of Indians of this reserve. It took time to watch, but even more, to
discover them. He became attached to this world more than he imagined. Images
offered to him by the Sioux, remained etched forever in his memory... and in
some wonderful paintings he painted in their camp.
[To be continued
on February 27th]
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