Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Matt Wolf’s insightful documentary provides a window not only into one woman’s recording obsession, but also into the world she committed to tape.

Activist Marion Stokes recorded television for 24 hours a day for 30 years. The result of her impressive archive is 70,000 VHS tapes that capture everything from revolutions, wars and natural disasters, to talk shows and commercials – demonstrating how television has responded to and shaped our world.

Marion’s lifelong project was bizarre yet visionary – the public would not find out until later that television networks were disposing of their archives. Marion’s recordings have now been digitised by the Internet Archive, saved as a time capsule for future generations to look back on.

Recorder first premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, before being screened at numerous other film festivals and museums around the world.