As a young woman, she was a socialist, fiercely aware of her own status as an African American, which she made the point of debate in the local discussion TV show she produced in the 60s. It also demonstrates that pressing a button is not such a mere thing. Having watched this documentary, I now think the project could also be seen as a gigantic adventure in conceptual art, and this is not to denigrate it in any way. Released by Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber, and directed by Teenage director Matt Wolf, Recorder tells the story of Marion Stokes, a woman whose life is truly the stuff of fiction. About an hour into the documentary 'Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project' comes the moment weve been dreading. The results are compelling. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Review: A VCR Obsession, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/movies/recorder-the-marion-stokes-project-review.html, Marion Stokes in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.. 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. Was the Marion Stokes project also a symptom of her own emotional dysfunction? The marriage broke up. At the time of her death in 2012, she had amassed over 70,000 hours of unedited footage across nine TV news channels. Clip 0:01:49 She taped local and national programs looking for cracks and contradictions in the official narrative. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is released in select cinemas and on demand on 6 th November 2020. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, which is skillfully directed by Matt Wolf, is an example of the type of documentary that can be a true hidden gem. Michael Metelits drolly comments that his mother saw Steve Jobs, whom she never met, as more of a son to her than he was. When the Iran hostage crisis began in 1979 she believed key facts were slowly being altered and manipulated by news stations, so until her death in 2012, she hit record to keep track of how the world It was there she met John Stokes, a wealthy white liberal: they married, and it was the second time around for both. Matt Wolfs latest documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project seeks to paint an all-encompassing comprehensive image with significant flair. 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. Full Review Rich Juzwiak The Muse/Jezebel One is reminded of David Bowies 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 doesnt explore the extent to which Marions original project of analysis was subsumed by the compulsion to tape everything. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project was originally released in the U.S. on November 15th, 2019. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Though at times, even Stokes herself might have wondered what it was, exactly, despite lucking out With rolling news and the arrival of late-night news programmes, there was simply much, much more being broadcast. In 'Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project' we get to meet Marion Stokes, a former TV producer and activist turned recluse. In the case of the titular subject of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project the new documentary from director Matt Wolf (Teenage) its clear by the end of this masterfully crafted narrative that she not only knew the why of her compulsion, but had the wherewithal to effect the how in a manner that now benefits us all. She didnt just hoard news: it was also books, Apple computers and piles of mouldering old newspapers, and it isnt clear even from this film if Stokes herself ever rewatched any footage. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Watch the trailer for Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project here: Related Items review In Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project-- one of two acclaimed documentaries by filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow Matt Wolf this year, along with Spaceship Earth-- an intriguing tale of a woman who believed in the power of the media to both distort and amplify the truth is revealed. Visit the page to bypass this warning and read the review. By Belle McIntyre Everything about this project boggles the mind. She was also eccentric and decidedly odd. She became involved with a local television program called Input.. Matt Wolf's new documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is an interesting meditation on these ideas, as well as a character study of a fascinating news-junkie with a mission. 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. Stokes was dismissed in some circles as a paranoid hoarder and recluse, as well as praised as a crucially essential activist archivist. Matt Wolfs remarkable Recorder uses Stokes recording obsession as a way to explore both Stokes herself and the world she literally committed to video tape. "She was obsessed with the mediation of the media. An African-American, leftist revolutionary, the Marion Stokes story starts off strangely simple. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project review by ClevernessEvade Letterboxd One of the best parts of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a scene with a four-way split screen that shows simultaneous newscasts of the morning of September 11, 2001. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Film Review: Compelling Portrait of a Nation Through the Lens of an Unknown Citizen. Seven years after her death, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, finally hits Play, to tell that story, and hers. A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project delves into the strange life of a radical Communist activist who became a fabulously wealthy and reclusive archivist. Opting out is increasingly impossible. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. This review may contain spoilers. And although the world may recognize Stokes solely for her lifes endeavors, those who knew her best possess a different image than most, a factor that Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project delves into with striking attention to detail. One womans obsession with recording the TV news becomes a fascinating visual chronicle of modern history. Other subjects include the unclassifiable artist Joe Brainard (I Remember, 2012) and the gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (Bayard and Me, 2017). Matt Wolfs documentary reveals the secret greatness of a reclusive activist. The results are compelling. 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, ABCs Good Morning America in the lower right, and CBSs The Morning Show in the lower left. ere is the strange, but undoubtedly compelling and even heroic story of Marion Stokes, a historian and television producer from, Commenting has been disabled at this time but you can still. a 2019 documentary film directed by Matt Wolf about Marion Stokes and the television news archive As a form of activism, to seek out the truth and check facts, she started recording everything that happened on television. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Trailer Radical activist-turned-recluse Marion Stokes videotaped everything on TV for thirty years in the name of truth. READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2019 Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below! His 2008 Wild Combination was about the avant-garde dance-music genius Arthur Russell. Up to eight VCRs would be humming in her crowded apartment, 24 hours a day. The documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project says yes. 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. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is available on digital platforms from 6 November. And I thought my DVR was full. Stokess idiosyncrasies, and the nature of her project, make her a good fit in Wolfs gallery of meaningful outliers. Marion increased the family fortune by buying Apple stock; she also collected, avidly, Apple products. 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. VCRs accumulated, human beings were alienated. Starting in the 1970s, political activist Marion Stokes embarked on the largest, most important project of her life: to record every moment of news footage possible. An ardent Communist activist, a librarian and archivist, twice married, mother to a son, M Theres almost certainly a link between a certain kind of genius and a certain kind of madness, which is one of the themes of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project director Matt Wolfs graphically sophisticated documentary about a most unusual woman who was on a mission. Read full review She generated a colossal archive of American public life: tens of thousands of videocassettes that had to be stored in nine apartments. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project review the woman who kept the TV on for 30 years With visionary zeal, the historian/TV producer collected 70,000 hours of television Can one become a historian merely by pressing a button? Not rated. Then theres Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. John Stokes left his family and married Marion. Do you think Marion Stokes was a visionary, an eccentric, or a little bit of both? Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. 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. Marions 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. Marion Stokes might help us remember the breadth of our humanity lest we forget any of it. F or 33 years, the elusive African-American archivist Marion Stokes religiously recorded the TV news for 24 hours a day. In 'Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project' we get to meet Marion Stokes, a former TV producer and activist turned recluse. Marions flash of insight came in the late 70s when she saw how TV news was being revolutionised. So, Stokes set to document it, knowing an archive of sorts may prove valuable one day. With visionary zeal, the historian/TV producer collected 70,000 hours of television news, creating a unique archive of US life, Last modified on Thu 5 Nov 2020 15.31 EST. Relating this stranger-than-fiction tale with the narrative twists and turns of a well-paced thriller, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project will make news junkies feel a lot better about themselves. It is the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. "The world is too much with us late and soon." The director Matt Wolf has in previous pictures considered some unique, and uniquely American, figures. In 1977, the first VHS recorder was sold in the US. She wanted to capture it like Britains Mass Observation Project and the TV stations were not keeping their own recorded footage. Marion Stokes, born in 1929 in Philadelphia, was an extraordinarily brilliant and prescient woman. Clip 0:01:49 After her death, the project was handed over to the Internet Archive in San Francisco, which digitised it and made it a searchable archive using the closed-caption subtitling: a resounding vindication of Stokess obsessive lifes work. Tribeca Film Review: Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project For 30 years, Marion Stokes taped every single hour of television news. This documentary shows Stokes to have the fanatical energy of a hoarder, the zeal of an evangelist and the intensity of a visionary. Here, though, the moment is presented much differently, due to the movies subject. This was true when William Wordsworth wrote it in the early 1800s, and it's even more true now. Raised in poverty, Stokes became a librarian in Philadelphia. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson "Wolf and his top-notch editor Keiko Deguchi build a picture of both a life consumed by news and the way that news has, in some ways, come to consume all our lives with its 24-hour cycle." " An activist-turned-recluse, Marion Stokes recorded the news on her television for 24 hours a day, for over 30 consecutive years. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Trailer Radical activist-turned-recluse Marion Stokes videotaped everything on TV for thirty years in the name of truth. 'Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project' is just what I needed, to get pulled into this doc-lovers paradise. Here is the strange, but undoubtedly compelling and even heroic story of Marion Stokes, a historian and television producer from Philadelphia who from the late 70s to her death in 2012 made a continuous, unbroken 24/7 video recording of nine TV news stations. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Review: A VCR Obsession Matt Wolfs documentary shows how one woman captured history by recording television news. Matt Wolfs documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, reveals how Marion recorded up to eight TV channels, 24/7, for 35 years, compiling an unprecedented account of human culture. Stokes saw that this vast new output would, almost accidentally, show more of the lives of working people and people of colour. 'Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project' is just what I needed, to get pulled into this doc-lovers paradise. But her taping of everything created an irreproducible archive that is enlightening and the stuff of madness. As a form of activism, to seek out the truth and check facts, she started recording everything that happened on television. Previously, news had been carefully edited and curated by the powers that be for relatively brief programmes: important things happening to important people. There is too much of "the world" to absorb. Matt Wolfs documentary shows how one woman captured history by recording television news. But is this the whole story? Triggered by the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, it was Marions belief that, the TV was part of what was taking us hostage, and so she set out to document how