The six films in this collection represent the early work of documentary filmmaker and Hollywood cameraman Peter Kuttner. The films include a student film made at Northwestern University, two films he made with students at Dillard University in New Orleans as part of the War on Poverty in 1965, and three kinescopes of shows he made at Chicago's public television station WTTW.

This collection documents the dance legacy and artistic circle of choreographer, Ruth Page, named by the Dance Heritage Coalition as one of America’s 100 Irreplaceable Dance Treasures. As the largest collection of moving image materials related to Ruth Page, this is a worthy complement to the vast manuscript collection that resides at the Jerome Robins Dance Division of the New York Public Library and the Newberry Library in Chicago. The collection contains rehearsals and performances that date back to 1922 including footage of Rudolph Nureyev soon after his defection from the Soviet Union, Balinese dances filmed during Page’s 1928 Asian Tour, and performances of The Merry Widow on the Ed Sullivan Show. It also contains the original and master tapes of numerous interviews with dance critics such as Clive Barnes and John Martin, dancers such as Larry Long, Delores Lipinski, Anne Kisselgoff and Maria Tallchief, and a comprehensive series of interviews and oral histories with Page herself that date from 1957 through 1987. Among the dozens of Ruth Page ballets contained in this collection is an original 35mm nitrate print of Bolero danced in 1928 at Ravinia in Highland Park, IL. This collection is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation

SERIES II of the Ruth Page Collection includes 2", 1" and 1/2" open reel video formats. These videos include footage of performances, rehearsals and television specials. The majority of the 1" videos are previous film transfers of select motion picture titles found in Series I, while the majority of the 1/2" videos contain unique footage of performances and rehearsals. The 2" video was digitized by DC Video while all 1" and 1/2" were digitized by Bay Area Video Coalition.

SERIES I of the Ruth Page Collection includes 16mm and 35mm prints and elements within the collection. These prints and elements include footage of performances, rehearsals, television specials as well as home movies shot in Indonesia in the late 1920's and unrelated advertising spots. Also included in this series are distribution prints, workprints and elements of the 1978 documentary "Ruth Page: An American Original" and 35mm preservation elements and prints of Bolero [1930, Highland Park, Ravinia] and Carmen [1930, Highland Park, Ravinia], which were preserved thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation. The 16mm prints were digitized in-house at Chicago Film Archives, while the 35mm prints were digitized at Colorlab.