The Jason Camuti Collection consists of over a thousand 16mm television episodes, movie serials, newsreels, educational films and home movies. The Harvard Film Archive acquired the films in 2014 from the family of Jason Camuti, a local collector who showed a particular interest in film and television produced in the mid-twentieth century. The collection includes extensive runs of the 1950s and 1960s television series Cavalcade of America, Four Star Playhouse and The Stu Erwin Show, as well as near complete runs of the movie serials Dick Tracy (1937), Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939) and Flash Gordon Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe (1940). Other items of interest include the unsettling amateur film Hunting Deer And…, selections of animated and classroom educational shorts, and home movies from various, often anonymous, filmmakers.
A discerning collector, Camuti amassed and curated a large selection of 16mm and 8mm films that provide a fascinating moving image record of cultural trends, concerns and celebrations from the 1920s to the 1970s.
This collection is catalogued in HOLLIS.