Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
Directed by Matt Wolf
2019, 87 minutes
Official Website | Watch The Film: iTunes, Amazon, Kanopy, DVD, UK, International
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Trailer from Matt Wolf on Vimeo.
Marion Stokes was secretly recording television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today.
Before “fake news” Marion was fighting to protect the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history. Remarkably Marion saved it, and now the Internet Archive will digitize her tapes and we’ll be able to search them online for free.
This is a mystery in the form of a time capsule. It’s about a radical Communist activist, who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. Her work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project.
Recorder premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, London Film Festival, and Hot Docs. It was released in theaters nationwide by Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber and was broadcast on PBS Independent Lens.
An End Cue and Electric Chinoland Production
in association with C41 Media
Produced by Kyle Martin, Andrew Kortschak, Walter Kortschak
Edited by Keiko Deguchi
Cinematographer Chris Dapkins
Score by Owen Pallett
Press & Reviews
“Outstanding... an information revolutionary, Stokes, despite her decades of isolation, touched the nerve center of the times.” Best Films of 2019 - New Yorker
“Weirdly exhilarating... Enlightening and the stuff of madness." Critic’s Pick - New York Times
“The Information Age has found a startling, eccentric heroine in the subject of Matt Wolf’s eye-opening documentary.” - LA Times
“Matt Wolf’s remarkable Recorder uses Stokes’ recording obsession as a way to explore both Stokes herself and the world she literally committed to video tape. The results are fascinating, weird, and often quite moving.” - Indiewire
“Intriguing from first minute to last... Relating this stranger-than-fiction tale with the narrative twists and turns of a well-paced thriller, Recorder will make news junkies feel a lot better about themselves.” - Hollywood Reporter
“Utterly compelling and beautifully textured… A thrilling portrait of a woman collecting the history of the world as she lived through it through the very media we all engaged with, this is a powerful and truly important documentary feature.” - CriterionCast
“Recorder quietly seeds damning observations about the ways media narratives are formed, and how the shapers of these narratives distort the truth and our worldview.” - Flixist
“Marion’s life makes for a pensive, complicated romantic tragedy.” - Nonfics
Artforum Feature
The Guardian Feature
NPR On the Media Interview
LA Review of Books Essay
Frieze Magazine Essay
Filmmaker Magazine Interview
“Weirdly exhilarating... Enlightening and the stuff of madness." Critic’s Pick - New York Times
“The Information Age has found a startling, eccentric heroine in the subject of Matt Wolf’s eye-opening documentary.” - LA Times
“Matt Wolf’s remarkable Recorder uses Stokes’ recording obsession as a way to explore both Stokes herself and the world she literally committed to video tape. The results are fascinating, weird, and often quite moving.” - Indiewire
“Intriguing from first minute to last... Relating this stranger-than-fiction tale with the narrative twists and turns of a well-paced thriller, Recorder will make news junkies feel a lot better about themselves.” - Hollywood Reporter
“Utterly compelling and beautifully textured… A thrilling portrait of a woman collecting the history of the world as she lived through it through the very media we all engaged with, this is a powerful and truly important documentary feature.” - CriterionCast
“Recorder quietly seeds damning observations about the ways media narratives are formed, and how the shapers of these narratives distort the truth and our worldview.” - Flixist
“Marion’s life makes for a pensive, complicated romantic tragedy.” - Nonfics
Artforum Feature
The Guardian Feature
NPR On the Media Interview
LA Review of Books Essay
Frieze Magazine Essay
Filmmaker Magazine Interview