Watch Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

"Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project" is a fascinating documentary released in 2019, directed by Matt Wolf. The movie tells the story of Marion Stokes, reportedly one of the most private, yet most obsessed figures in media history. The documentary follows her for over 30 years as she obsessively recorded television news. Marion Stokes was a Philadelphia resident and an activist in the 1960s and 1970s who largely shunned the world of politics and media as a means of reaching her aims. She became an early adopter of video recording technology, and in the late 1970s, when 24-hour cable news networks such as CNN emerged on the scene, she became a deep gazer of the media. In 1979, she began recording news broadcasts and never stopped. She captured over 70,000 VHS tapes, nine primary duplicates, and thousands of single recordings, which still bear witness to the major events of our world from the Iranian hostage crisis to the beginnings of the Iraq war to the fall of the Soviet Union, along with countless other defining moments.

After her passing in December 2012, the movie talks of how her son, Michael, with whom she had a distant relationship, brought the trove of tapes into a storage unit in Harlem. What Michael knew, but which the public did not, was that Stokes' recordings continued up to the point of her death. What began as a personal venture back in 1979 now housed potentially unique historic insight across four decades of television news. To archive it was a herculean job, with a price tag only partly revealed in the documentary, but it was worth it. Stokes' legacy has enabled a whole new angle on TV news history while revealing the person behind it.

"Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project" is primarily based on archival footage from her vast collection, interviews from family members, and other experts. The film paints a portrait of an enigmatic yet ennobling figure who was both a hoarder and a historian, but also someone who was ahead of her time. Michael's moving footage in which he tries to negotiate his mother's hoarding is particularly poignant. The deeply personal story of Marion is interwoven with broader societal conversations about how we deal with information at a time when media is saturating our lives.

The film talks of how Marion's obsessive behavior surrounding the media was often considered to be a manifestation of paranoia or other emotional issues. She would spend up to 16 hours per day watching multiple TV sets which feed into her recording set-up while keeping an eagle eye on any media appearances by her dearly beloved President Carter. Others who are interviewed in the film also offer their reflections and insights into her mania. What is certain is that Stokes' recordings have now provided crucial footage that has enabled TV news history to be examined with much greater depth.

The archival footage ranges from news clips to commercials to soap operas and talk shows, and it was all seen through the eyes of Marian. She was a leading collector of media, but this also spread to books, newspapers, and magazines which, at one point in her life, were piled up around her house. It was as if she wanted to compile the entire human existence. She was a hoarder, but she was also an obsessive and, at times, eccentric researcher who would get lost for hours in a sea of paper records.

One of the highlights of the documentary is the footage of the Iranian hostage crisis. Stokes captures the initial moment of the crisis and then steadily records the reaction of TV stations and politicians as it unfolds July 1979 until January 1981. The footage covers everything up to Reagan's Inauguration, and it is a unique piece of history as it reflects on how those events were seen at the time.

"Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project" is truly a documentary that generates thought and is eye-opening, as so much of what we see in these tapes, from world events to commercials, resonate with us today. Stokes seems to have predicted where media, and the world around it, were headed better than anyone else. Her prediction was based on the simple notion that communication could be faster and more connected than ever before. The film, full of precious documentation of a time long-gone, is a moving and impressive tribute to her life's work.

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a 2019 documentary with a runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes. It has received mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 7.0 and a MetaScore of 75.