Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

This remarkable documentary chronicles the late 20th century into the 21st, as experienced by a woman who might be the original news junkie. Marion Stokes (1929–2012) became known as a passionate activist, articulately espousing her leftist views on local television in Philadelphia.

Recorder pulls you into her secret life, revealing that she spent decades obsessively recording TV programs around the clock. From the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis to the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Stokes captured revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials on 70,000 VHS tapes. A second marriage brought wealth, but she ultimately became a recluse who saw her life’s work to be protecting the truth by archiving everything on TV.

Tickets can be purchased at https://www.mfah.org/calendar/recorder-the-marion-stokes-project

“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

“A pensive, complicated romantic tragedy.” —Nonfics

“More than just a portrait of a woman’s complicated relationships and obsessions … 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

• “The Incredible Story of Marion Stokes” —Fast Company

• Find out more about Marion Stokes and her archive.

• Read an article about the film in Talkhouse, written by director Matt Wolf.

• Read The New York Times review of the film.