Morris Engel, who died Saturday at age 86,was a photographer and early independent filmmaker whose debut feature, “Little Fugitive,” was cited as a seminal influence on French New Wave cinema by no less an authority than Francois Truffaut.

A photojournalist who won a commendation for his work on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, Engel found work after the war as a freelance street photographer for such magazines as PM. A lifelong tinker with photographic equipment, Engel invented a movie camera that made it possible to shoot 35 mm without a tripod, thanks in part to a steadying shoulder strap. With the camera liberated and mobile, an improvisatory, almost documentary like feel became possible. He shot “Little Fugitive” (1953) on a budget of $30,000 with a minimal crew. The film won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival (other winners that year included Federico Fellini and John Huston) and was nominated for an Academy Award for best story.

“Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie,” Truffaut told the New Yorker.

“It was the first American film that had an international distribution,” a film historian and longtime friend of Engel, Foster Hirsch, said. “He was doing it years before the others.”

Engel went on to film two more award-winning features in the 1950s, but his film career sputtered after that. In 1997, “Little Fugitive” was inducted into the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board.

Engel was raised in Brooklyn, mainly in Williamsburg and Coney Island, where much of “Little Fugitive” was shot. He had fond memories of attending Abraham Lincoln High School, a state-of-the-art institution, shortly after it opened. In 1936, Engel joined the Photo League, an idealistic organization that believed photography could be an agent of social change. Through the league, Engel joined the crew on “Native Land,” a film about labor struggles in the 1930s, starring Paul Robeson.

Engel had his first solo show of photography at the New School in 1939, featuring images of urban squalor, many shot in Harlem. He went on staff at PM, where he worked as a photojournalist, then enlisted in the Navy. He spent four years as a combat photographer, and was cited for his D-Day photos by Edward Steichen, head of the Navy combat photography team.

After the war, Engel took freelance photographic assignments and began experimenting with film. “Little Fugitive” was written by a friend, Ray Ashley, and edited by Engel’s wife, Ruth Orkin, whom he married during shooting. Orkin was a successful street photographer herself, most famous for her picture “American Girl in Italy, 1951,” which depicts a gallery of wolf-whistlers and a discomfited ingenue.

The two worked together again on Engel’s next feature, “Lovers and Lollipops” (1956), the story of a love affair shot at New York settings from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx Zoo. A restored version was screened at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art last November, along with films by D.A. Pennebaker, John Cassavetes, and Andy Warhol.

“Weddings and Babies,” which Engel shot in 1958, shared the Critics Prize at Venice with Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” but failed to find a distributor for two years. Having successfully pioneered independent filmmaking, Engel pioneered its pitfalls as well.

During the 1960s, Engel continued to take freelance photo assignments and worked on several smaller film projects and commercials, including one for Oreos. In 1968 he filmed the hippie-themed “I Need a Ride to California,” which was never released.

In recent years, Engel’s films have been rediscovered by critics and released on video. He shot two video productions, each told from a child’s point of view. Neither found distribution.

He continued to tinker with equipment, and created his own panoramic cameras by welding together the bodies of several conventional cameras, his daughter, Mary, said. A sampling of the work can be seen atengelphoto.com. His photos were in the collections of museums around the country, and MoMA is in the process of restoring and preserving all of Engel’s films, his daughter said.

Morris Engel
Born April 8, 1918, in Brooklyn; died March 5 at his Manhattan home after suffering from cancer; survived by his children, Andy and Mary, a grandson, and two sisters, Pearl and Helen.