French actor, director, and illustrator, considered one of the creators of the “French Western” (or “western-camembert”) along with his friend director Jean Durand.
Hamman discovered his vocation as a filmmaker when at twelve he attended one of the screenings of Auguste and Louis Lumière at the Salon Indie of the Grand Café in Paris in December 1895. At 21, while on a business trip with his father in the United States, he discovered the Wild West Shows of Buffalo Bill. Back in France, Hamman started shooting Westerns (as an actor and director) in the Paris region. His Cow-boy (1906) – the first Western according to him – and Le Desperado (1907) were shot for the firm Lux. After meeting with the Marquis de Baroncelli, he shot his films in Camargue.
In 1921, he founded a production company, Les Films Joë Hamman, and continued to make films until 1937. After the Second World War, his film career in the Western genre was over, because Western films shot in the United States supplanted French films. He then played small roles, notably in cinemas, until 1967.
A drawer and watercolorist, Joë Hamman was part of the “circle of Mortigny”, a group of Parisian artists founded by Dimitri d’Osnobichine in 1908.
In 1962, he published Du Far-West à Montmartre, an autobiography prefaced by Jean Cocteau.
He died on 30 June 1974, aged 90, in Dieppe.
Link to Wikipedia biography (French)