‘Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project’ Review: A VCR Obsession
Matt Wolf’s documentary shows how one woman captured history by recording television news. The results are compelling.
- Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
- NYT Critic's Pick
- Directed by Matt Wolf
- Documentary
- 1h 27m
Can one become a historian merely by pressing a button? The documentary “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project” says yes. It also demonstrates that pressing a button is not such a mere thing.
The director Matt Wolf has in previous pictures considered some unique, and uniquely American, figures. His 2008 “Wild Combination” was about the avant-garde dance-music genius Arthur Russell. Other subjects include the unclassifiable artist Joe Brainard (“I Remember,” 2012) and the gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (“Bayard and Me,” 2017). Stokes’s idiosyncrasies, and the nature of her project, make her a good fit in Wolf’s gallery of meaningful outliers.
Raised in poverty, Stokes became a librarian in Philadelphia. As a young African-American woman in the 1950s, she was drawn to social activism; she met and married a like-minded teacher, Melvin Metelits, with whom she had a son, Michael. The marriage broke up. She became involved with a local television program called “Input.”
While a producer and panelist on that show, she met John Stokes Jr., a wealthy philanthropist with whom she shared perspectives on many issues, including community and communication. When she watched the original “Star Trek” series, the diverse dynamics of the Enterprise seemed to her “televised socialism.” As home videotape recorders went on the market, she bought one, then more. She taped local and national programs looking for cracks and contradictions in the official narrative.
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John Stokes left his family and married Marion. VCRs accumulated, human beings were alienated. Marion increased the family fortune by buying Apple stock; she also collected, avidly, Apple products. Michael Metelits drolly comments that his mother saw Steve Jobs, whom she never met, as more of a son to her than he was.
Marion accelerated her tapings in the late ’70s, at the time of the Iran hostage crisis, and continued until her death in 2012, capturing decades’ worth of news images of world events. In one compelling sequence, Wolf splits the screen into four quadrants of synchronized footage showing CNN in the upper left, Fox 5 in the upper right, ABC’s “Good Morning America” in the lower right, and CBS’s “The Morning Show” in the lower left. It is the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. CNN has a feed from a camera trained on the twin towers the whole time; the other stations are slower to get their special reports on, with Fox the last to abandon its happy-talk morning news.
By the end of the 1980s if not before, Marion and John became shut-ins, prisoners of “content.” The story is a bit ghastly but also, viewed from this remove, weirdly exhilarating. One is reminded of David Bowie’s extraterrestrial in the 1976 “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” hypnotized by a bank of monitors, or of a more sentient, intellectual version of Chauncey Gardiner, the television-addicted unholy fool of “Being There.” “Recorder” doesn’t explore the extent to which Marion’s original project of analysis was subsumed by the compulsion to tape everything. But her taping of everything created an irreproducible archive that is enlightening and the stuff of madness.
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Marion Stokes, coproducer of TV show
Marion Marguerite Stokes, 83, a librarian and social justice advocate who was a coproducer of a 1960s Sunday morning TV talk show entitled Input, died of lung disease Friday, Dec. 14, at her home in Rittenhouse Square.
From 1967 to 1969, Mrs. Stokes and her future husband, John Stokes Jr., were co-producers, with David Van Meter, of Input, on which a panel would discuss key issues. The show aired on Channel 10.
Mrs. Stokes often appeared on the show with her future husband.
"The television show was something she was enormously proud of," said her son, Michael Metelits. "She felt that it had an impact on Philadelphia. It was rare for a black woman to be on television."
A 1968 article in the Bulletin described the show as "unusually forthright," tackling such issues as birth control, environmental pollution, student unrest, and racial divisions.
It said "conservatives, radicals, blacks, whites, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and agnostics" appeared on the show - sounding off with such verve that it should be named "Output."
Mrs. Stokes was born on Nov. 25, 1929, in Germantown. She graduated from Philadelphia High School for Girls.
After high school, Mrs. Stokes worked as a librarian for the Free Library of Philadelphia from the 1940s to the early 1960s.
She then went to work for Wellspring, a Christian social service organization, which developed the show, Metelits said.
She was married three times and was twice divorced. In 1960, she married Melvin Metelits, a teacher. She later married John Stokes Jr., her coproducer and a retired engineer. He died in 2007.
In the early 1960s, Mrs. Stokes was the Philadelphia chair for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a national organization opposed to the economic boycott of the communist country.
She was active in the effort to integrate Girard College. Mrs. Stokes also helped organize five buses from Philadelphia to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, her son said.
"She had a keen sense of any injustice," Metelits said. "She was incredibly intelligent, with a sense of politics that was fierce."
In the 1980s and '90s, Mrs. Stokes was an early investor in information technology companies, her son said.
"She loved Macintosh computers and anything to do with Apple products. . . . She gave me my first one in 1985, and she would give them to people going off to college," Metelits said. "Technology was a passion of hers."
She also enjoyed watching cable news shows and collecting dollhouses, Metelits said.
He said that when Hurricane Katrina struck, one of her stepchildren was working as a reporter in New Orleans, so she sent a pallet of hand-crank radios there.
"She just bought it and shipped it down there so people could know what was going on," Metelits said.
In addition to her son, Mrs. Stokes is survived by two grandchildren and three step-grandchildren.
Visitation will be at 10 a.m. Friday, Dec. 21, followed by a funeral at 11, at the Bringhurst Funeral Home, 225 Belmont Ave., Bala Cynwyd. Burial will follow at West Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Marion Marguerite Stokes (born Marion Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012)[1] was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, access television producer, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and prolific archivist, especially known for amassing hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death at age 83,[2] at which time she operated nine properties and three storage units.[3]
Collections[edit]
Television news[edit]
The tape collection consisted of 24/7-coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, and other networks—recorded on up to eight separate VCRs stationed throughout her house. She had a husband and children, and family outings were planned around the length of a VHS tape. Every six hours when the tapes would be ending, Stokes and her husband would run around the house to switch them out—even cutting short meals at restaurants to make it home to switch out tapes in time. Later in life when she was not as agile, Stokes trained a helper to do the task for her.[4] The archives ultimately grew to 71,716 (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media)[5] VHS and Betamax tapes stacked in her home, and apartments she rented just to store them.[2]
She became convinced there was a lot of detail in the news at risk of disappearing forever, and began taping. Her son, Michael Metelits, told WNYC that Stokes "channeled her natural hoarding tendencies to [the] task [of creating an archive]".[3]
Her collection is not the only instance of massive television footage taping, but the care in preserving the collection is very unusual. Known collections of similar scale have not been as well-maintained and lack the timely and local focus.[6]
Macintosh computers[edit]
Stokes bought many Macintosh computers since the brand's inception,[4] along with various other Apple peripherals. At her death, 192 of the computers remained in her possession. Stokes kept the unopened items in a climate-controlled storage garage for posterity. The collection, speculated to be one of the last of its nature remaining, sold on eBay to an anonymous buyer.[7]
Others[edit]
She received half a dozen daily newspapers and 100-150 monthly periodicals,[3] collected for half a century.[4] She accumulated 30,000-40,000 books. Metelits told WNYC that in the mid-1970s, they would frequent the bookstore to purchase $800 worth of new books.[3] She collected toys and dollhouses.[8]
Television producer[edit]
From 1967 to 1969 Stokes co-produced a Sunday morning television show in Philadelphia called Input, with her husband John.[9] Its focus was on social justice topics.
Legacy[edit]
Stokes bequeathed her son Michael Metelits the entire television collection, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After a stringent process of considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to The Internet Archive one year after Stokes' death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection cross-country to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco,[2] a move which cost her estate $16,000.[8] It was the largest collection they had ever received.[10]
The group agreed to digitize the volumes, a process which was expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of November 2014, the project was still active.[2]
A documentary about her life, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, was directed by Matt Wolf and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.[11][12]
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