About:
Cinema and photography offer diverse, personal and nearly unlimited means to explore distant lands and internal landscapes through the lenses, filters, eyes and personalities of fellow wayfarers, poets and story tellers. A film or a photograph allows us to record our journeys or to experience those of other such travelers who derive pleasure in framing the world through a camera and capturing their subjects in an interplay of light and shadow. At the very least, the experience can entertain, divert or provide escape; at best, it can transport, expand one’s horizons or offer a momentary safe harbor. Like all successful travel to a new place, it can give a stay against confusion, provide catharsis, connect one to the universal or reacquaint one with oneself.
This website will serve as port of call for my work as a filmmaker, photographer, critic and educator. And while its prime purpose may be to shamelessly promote my own projects, it will also serve as a vessel to pay tribute to the many films and artists that have taken me on memorable voyages of discovery, connection, and self-discovery.
Ralph Hammann
After studying film at NYU, Ralph Hammann took a detour into education. Thirty-five years later, after teaching high school film & theater (actress/director Elizabeth Banks was a student who got her start with him), he has returned to his first love, film. He was also a published film & critic for 40 years in the Berkshires & Albany, NY.
I suppose as a 68 year new filmmaker, I am an anomaly, but as a long-time film teacher and critic, I have been preparing most of my life to put to use the lessons I have learned and taught from the likes of Kurosawa, Fellini, Kubrick, Lean, Truffaut, Chabrol, Welles, Hitchcock, Reed, Fisher and Burns.
One film that I am currently submitting to festivals is a shortened (2 hour 59 minute) version of a 9 hour 23 minute episodic film about the second U.S. Poet Laureate, Richard Wilbur. This shorter version is intended to stand alone as feature documentary and is conceived in two parts. The other is the longer film which affords one the opportunity to live for an extended period in the company of a humble genius and some of his admirers (among them: Dana Gioia, Stephen Sondheim, Austin Pendleton, Donald Hall, Rhina P. Espaillat, William Blakemore, Brian Bedford, John Simon, Alicia Stallings…)
Each film is something of a masterclass in creativity, poetry, humanity, and how to conduct one’s life with dignity and grace. They are also intimate looks into how one of our most remarkable and best loved writers faced mortality in the last years of his long life.
