http://www.thelondoneconomic.com/film/forgotten-film-friday-little-fugitive/14/04/
Boomboxes used in REVOLUTIONS ON AIR: The Golden Era of NY Radio 1980-1988
TRAILER: REVOULUTIONS ON AIR: The Golden Era of New York Radio 1980 – 1988
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6sYaLs4jE
Boys with Boom box by Morris Engel
Morris Engel films in THE DAILY PIC – Artnet News
THE DAILY PIC (#1636): I’m ashamed that I’d never heard of the films of Morris Engel until just recently, given how wonderful and influential they are. Francois Truffaut said that the movies of the French New Wave would never have existed if their directors hadn’t had the example of Engel to follow, and the same can pretty clearly be said about John Cassavetes and similar American auteurs.
It soothes my ego just a touch to note that even my most cinephilic friends had also not heard of him.
Today’s Pic is the publicity shot for Weddings and Babies, the last of the three films that Engel made, all between 1953 and 1960 and all in collaboration with his wife the street photographer Ruth Orkin. (Engel too spent most of his career as a photojournalist.) It may be my favorite of his films. It tells the poignant story of a perpetually about-to-be-married couple who run a tiny weddings-and-babies photo studio in Little Italy in New York, and make extra money by filming the street life around them.
As in all of Engel’s films, he gives the streets of New York as important a role as any of his human characters. The gorgeous chaos he wanders through is wonderful to watch, and painful, too, from the vantage point of our ever more corporate, antiseptic and Dallas-ized city. Engel’s New York is made extra present because he films its streets with a handheld 35mm camera that he helped design. The cinematographers of the French New Wave owed some of their own hand-holding to him.
Engel’s human characters are also amazing. In Weddings and Babies there’s one old woman with dementia who, despite barely uttering a single line, is utterly compelling. That must be because she’s almost certainly more-or-less playing herself.
A few of Engel’s actors were pros, sometimes even well-known ones. But a lot of them were untrained, asked to improvise their way into their roles. Again, Truffaut and his pals were given extra license to cast “ordinary” people in their films because Engel had done it first.
There are flaws in Engel’s art – he was figuring it out as he went, and sometimes fell back on Hollywood sentiment. (His films’ scores are painfully full of it, despite the occasional moment of jazzy modernism.)
It was easier to get New Wave style right once you had the films of Engel as a reference point. (Image ©1958 Morris Engel)
For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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Morris Engel photograph from PM included in exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo above – Copyright Morris Engel with Ad Reinhardt
Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video
May 16, 2016 – October 30, 2016
Exhibition Overview
Artists have always turned to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dreams have been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who pushed the technical limits of the medium to transform the camera’s realist documents into fantastical compositions. Whereas their modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, more recently contemporary photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through increasingly open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description.
This exhibition takes a cue from the artists it features by displaying a constellation of photographs that collectively evoke the experience of a waking dream. Here, a night sky composed of pills, a fragmented rainbow, a sleeping fairy-tale princess, and an alien underwater landscape illuminate hidden impulses and longings underlying contemporary life. Drawn entirely from The Met collection, Dream States features approximately 30 photographs and video works primarily from the 1970s to the present.
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/dream-states
Photographs above of exhibition photos courtesy of Eileen Travell
PM Exhibition featuring Morris Engel opens at Steven Kasher Gallery in NY 1/14/16
PM EXHIBITION AT STEVEN KASHER GALLERY IN JANUARY 2016
Morris Engel worked on the staff of PM in the 1940’s and it was one of the most exciting and rewarding times of his photographic career. He photographed Babe Ruth, Mayor Fiorello La guardia, Ingrid Bergman, Comden and Green and many others. Opens 1/14/16 – 2/20/16.
LITTLE FUGITIVE ON TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES (TCM) on 1/12/16
LITTLE FUGITIVE ON TCM – JANUARY 12, 2016 AT 8:00PM
To celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art Film Archive, LITTLE FUGITIVE will be shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). LOVERS and LOLLIPOPS and WEDDINGS and BABIES and two documentaries by Mary Engel, RUTH ORKIN: FRAMES OF LIFE AND MORRIS ENGEL: THE INDEPENDENT will also be shown over the next three years.
http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article.html?isPreview=&id=1150520|220886&name=Little-Fugitive
CONEY ISLAND EXHIBIT AT BROOKLYN MUSEUM – 3/13/16
CONEY ISLAND: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861 – 2008 is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art until 3/13/16. Morris Engel’s photographs and a clip from LITTLE FUGITIVE are included in this exhibit.
LOVERS AND LOLLIPOPS double feature with CAROL
LOVERS and LOLLIPOPS double feature with Todd Haynes new film CAROL at Lincoln Center 11/18/15
Join us for a special double-feature event with screenings of Carol and Lovers and Lollipops, plus an extended conversation with Todd Haynes.
CAROL
Todd Haynes, USA, 2015, DCP, 118m
Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s early novel stars Cate Blanchett as the titular Carol, a wealthy suburban wife and mother, and Rooney Mara as an aspiring photographer. They meet by chance, fall in love almost at first sight, and defy the closet of the early 1950s to be together. Working with his longtime cinematographer Ed Lachman and shooting on the Super-16 film he favors for its echoes of the movie history of 20th-century America, Haynes charts subtle shifts of power and desire in images that are alternately luminous and oppressive. Blanchett and Mara are both splendid; the erotic connection between their characters is palpable from beginning to end, as much in its repression as in eagerly claimed moments of expressive freedom. Originally published under a pseudonym, Carol is Highsmith’s most affirmative work; Haynes has more than done justice to the multilayered emotions evoked by the original. A Weinstein Company release. An NYFF53 selection.
Screening with:
LOVERS AND LOLLIPOPS
Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin, USA, 1955, 35mm, 82m
Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin followed up their paradigm-shifting debut feature Little Fugitive with another film about a young child discovering and challenging the habits of adults. As was true for the directors’ earlier film, the plot of Lovers and Lollipops—a 7-year-old girl goes to escalating lengths to disrupt her widowed mother’s burgeoning romance with a sympathetic old friend—registers less than its constant stream of precisely observed, improbably sustained moments: a visit to the Museum of Modern Art; a bedtime reading that escalates into a mini-confrontation; a trip to the Bronx Zoo. An underappreciated landmark of American independent filmmaking, Lovers and Lollipops is a fleet-footed, stylish document of an older New York, and a crucial period reference for Haynes’s sumptuous new film,Carol.
http://www.filmlinc.org/events/an-evening-with-todd-haynes/
Mary Engel and Todd Haynes
New book – OUTSIDE Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin From Street Photography to Filmmaking – 4/14
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- cover of OUTSIDE
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- spread from OUTISDE
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- spread from OUTSIDE
OUTSIDE
MORRIS ENGEL RUTH ORKIN
From Street Photography to Filmmaking
With LITTLE FUGITIVE, hailed by Francois Truffaut and rewarded at the Venice Film Festival in 1953,
the work of Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin was at the origin of a new style that revolutionized the history of cinema,
announcing the French New Wave and independent production in America. Featuring a rich and unpublished
iconography, this book presents keys to the photographic and cinematographic journey of these iconic figures.
Published by Editions Carlotta Films, Edited by Stefan Cornic,
with introductions by Alain Bergala, Anne Morra (MoMA) and Mary Engel
200 pages, Hardcover 9″ x 12″ $50 – Published by Editions Carlotta Films
To order book:
VARIETY – Daily Update – October 16, 2014 by John Hopewell
A second coffee table book features U.S. indie filmmaking couple Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin
whose 1953 “The Little Fugitive,” the story of a child growing up on Coney Island,
was a huge influence on the French Nouvelle Vague in its use of non-pros, naturalism and hand-held 35mm camera.
Coinciding with the re-release of “Little Fugitive,” this publication marks the first book ever on the
couple, also distinguished photographers, Vincent Paul-Boncour said.
Carlotta holds international rights to “The Little Fugitive” and Engel and Orkin’s
“Lovers and Lollipops,” and “Weddings and Babies.”
