In 1997, I had the good fortune to spend some time with filmmaker Morris Engel. I was just finishing work on the VHS releases of his three best-known films: Little Fugitive (1953), Lovers and Lollipops (1956), and Weddings and Babies (1958). Afterward, he invited me to his apartment on Central Park West to look at a new project he was completing.

At the time, independent filmmaking had not yet been revolutionized by digital video, though change was in the air. Engel, at age 79, was already on the cutting edge. At least a year prior, he had purchased a DV camera and home editing system, and was almost done with a feature film (and this was two years before The Blair Witch Project [1999], generally considered the "breakthrough" shot-on-video indie film).

Shot over the course of twelve months, Engel's film charted a year in the life of a young New Yorker (from her second to third birthdays). One watches her evolve from a baby-talking toddler into a sprightly girl, just beginning to stretch her wings and experience the first stirrings of independence. In some ways, it was a return to Engel's first and most famous film, Little Fugitive, in which he simply follows the whims and antics of a child with a hand-held camera and natural light, capturing those everyday moments of overlooked beauty, happiness and pain.

Morris Engel was born on April 8, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised essentially by his mother, as his father, Nathan, had died when Engel was three. Nathan's death clearly had a profound impact on Engel, whose early films focus on children, raised by single mothers. These young protagonists occasionally find fragile happiness in the presence of substitute fathers (men who seem unaware just how much their attention nourishes the child).

At age eighteen, Engel found his true calling in life. His interest in photography had outgrown the boyish hobby it had been while attending Abraham Lincoln High school. In 1936 he joined the social activist Photo League of New York. Other Photo League alumni include Aaron Siskind, Berenice Abbott, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White and Richard Avedon. The most influential member was one of its founders, Paul Strand, who became Engel's mentor and an apparent father substitute. According to Engel, Strand was, "one of the most important men in my life."

During this period -- the golden age of the photo periodicals, such as Life and Look -- Engel became a staff photojournalist for the left-leaning newspaper P.M.

Under Strand's tutelage, Engel honed his skills as a photographer and received his first direct exposure to filmmaking on the set of Strand and Leo Hurwitz's outspoken treatise on civil liberty: Native Land (1942).

World War II erupted prior to Native Land's release, and Engel enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he was assigned to Combat Photo Unit #8. His military career can best be summed up by a citation awarded him on October 27, 1945, crediting him with "outstanding achievement while serving as a U.S. Navy Combat photographer... for an exceptionally fine series of still photographs of the invasions of Southern France and on the Normandy Beaches, where his indifference to danger and his keen awareness of what scenes were most vital in the action around him, resulted in a contribution of great value to the visual records of the war. His photograph showing enemy dead on the Normandy beach, taken on D-Day and in the face of grave danger, is one of the great pictures of the war and reflects the highest credit upon Engel and the U.S. Navy photographic service."

The citation was signed by another legendary photographer who shaped Engel's career, (Col.) Edward Steichen.

After the war, Engel returned to photojournalism at P.M., while picking up free-lance work for such publications as Collier's and McCall's. His interest in filmmaking was rekindled while working on a project for Ladies' Home Journal. Part of the ongoing photo series "How America Lives," the spread documented the struggles of two young homesteaders who had obtained farmland in Idaho through the Department of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation. In addition to stills, Engel shot a companion short film entitled The Farm They Won, at a cost of $500, utilizing a lightweight hand-held 35mm motion picture camera he had constructed with the assistance of Charles Woodruff.

Around this time, Engel became romantically involved with another New York-based photographer: Ruth Orkin (1921-1985), who had contributed free-lance images to The New York Times, Life, and Look, among others. By the time they married in 1952, Engel and Orkin had already become close collaborators. With his hand-held 35mm camera, Engel, Orkin, and Ray Ashley embarked on an experiment in impromptu filmmaking, following a seven-year-old boy (Richie Andrusco) on an odyssey through Coney Island. With little money ($30,000), no real crew, and only the barest bones of a plot, Little Fugitive was closer to photojournalism than Hollywood filmmaking, yet it won the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, and earned an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (which was ironic, since the film was largely improvised).

Film historian Foster Hirsch noted, "Truffaut said that without Little Fugitive we wouldn't have had our French New Wave. We have to take that comment seriously. As a film historian I can say that LF was the first of its kind. It was really, truly the first American independent film. John Cassavetes and Shadows [1959] often get credit for that but that's not true. It's Little Fugitive, seven years before. It was the first American independent film that had worldwide screenings."

Engel and Orkin (without Ashley) followed up the success of Little Fugitive with another intimate film told from a child's perspective: Lovers and Lollipops (1956). The latter film was more carefully structured than the former, and was cast with professional actors (with the significant exception of seven-year-old newcomer Cathy Dunn). In an adorable publicity stunt, Engel and Orkin photographed Andrusco taking Dunn on a "date" to see the finished film, and advising her on the pleasures and perils of child stardom.

Engel made his third feature in 1958, without Orkin's official involvement. Weddings and Babies stars John Myhers as a wedding photographer suffering from mid-life malaise: caring for his aging mother (Chiarina Barile), running his business, and managing a troubled relationship with his girlfriend (Viveca Lindfors) who is feeling the maternal urge. As with his previous films, there were clear autobiographical elements in Weddings and Babies, as Engel himself stood at the crossroads of career and family. But while the filmic photographer opted to devote himself to his work (at the expense of his relationship), Engel himself plunged into parenthood. Orkin gave birth to a son, Andy, in 1959. Two years later, they had a daughter, Mary.

Now a family man, Engel took leave of feature filmmaking. Weddings and Babies had not enjoyed the same success as his prior films, so he pursued commercial filmmaking for CBS, Chase Manhattan Bank, and a variety of corporate clients. He continued to indulge his knack for child's-eye-view filmmaking by taking extensive home movies of Andy and Mary.

While Engel toiled in commercial filmmaking, Orkin's photography gained notoriety, earning her an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1965. In 1978, Harper and Row published a book of Orkin's photographs taken from the vantage of the family's apartment window. A World Through My Window was followed, four years later, with a second volume, More Pictures from My Window.

By the time Engel returned to feature filmmaking, the marketplace no longer welcomed the kinds of small, charming films in which he specialized. His films The Dog Lover (1962) and I Need a Ride to California (1968) remain virtually unseen today. The cost of shooting in 35mm prohibited the making of another feature, and he again stepped away from filmmaking.

A quarter of a century passed before circumstances permitted Engel to return to filmmaking. During this time, Orkin died of natural causes (on January 16, 1985). Having reached the age of retirement, Engel could return at last to his passion for filmmaking. True to form, he sought to capture the discovery of life, through the eyes of a child.

He utilized analog video equipment to shoot the unreleased feature A Little Bit Pregnant (1994), which documented one family's preparations for birth, focusing on one sibling-to-be's anxiety about the blessed event.

Four years later, Engel returned to this same family and the unborn child of A Little Bit Pregnant became the central focus of his intimate year-in-the-life drama Camellia.

Camellia (1998), as the film came to be called, was not afforded a theatrical or video release. Simplicity and delicacy in storytelling are almost passe with contemporary audiences - who also insist upon a degree of technical polish that a mere man with a movie camera (single-handed and self-financed) could not bring without unduly intruding upon the family that had graciously allowed him a year's access to their lives.

Though Engel was surely disappointed that Camellia didn't circulate beyond private screenings, I don't think he was discouraged. For him, the greatest reward of filmmaking seemed to be the sheer enjoyment of the process. He was a man in whom the creative spirit flowed truly unabated.

During the 1990s, he was also experimenting with extreme panoramic still photography. These breathtaking photomontages were shot on the streets of New York, and were comprised of three wide-format images laid end-to-end. Engel explained that he was able to shoot the scenes and catch bystanders unaware because he didn't draw attention to himself. He was just an inconspicuous man, holding a small, inconspicuous camera. He would rotate his body and snap the three exposures, "Zip zip zip."

After I viewed Camellia, the bright-eyed, soft-spoken Engel gave me a tour of the apartment, filled with photographs and mementos of his life with Orkin. I was permitted to look through the window through which Orkin took her celebrated series of photographs (including several that look down upon the Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons). I met their daughter, Mary, who has dedicated herself to the preservation of her parents' work, and who is a filmmaker herself, having directed two documentaries devoted to her parents' work: Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life (1997) and Morris Engel: The Independent (2007).

As a parting gift, Engel gave me a token of appreciation - a sculpture he had made, resembling a pocket watch, in which the detached cogs and gears hang suspended in a sphere of clear Lucite. Engel had made several of the watch sculptures to give to friends. It was an item rich in meaning for Engel. He said that after his father's death, he inherited Nathan's pocket watch, which became his most treasured possession. It also represented Engel the boundless creator who, when not making photographs and films, was crafting sculptures and hand-made kaleidoscopes. The gears floating in the watch were not unlike the sprockets of a movie camera, and were a reminder of the camera Engel had hand-crafted, with which he shot his first films.

Fortunately, Engel was able to see his life's work properly appreciated in his final years. Little Fugitive was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1997. In 2001, Engel earned one of the highest honors a filmmaker can attain: a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Morris Engel died of cancer at age 86, on March 5, 2005.

by Bret Wood