Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
Dir. Matt Wolf. / Dur. 87 mins / Country. USA
Festival Strand:- Documentary
In A Nutshell:- The life story Marion Stokes, a political activist who spent 30 years obsessively archiving US TV news broadcasts, amassing over 70,000 VHS tapes.
The Good:- From the mid-80s through to around 2005*, I spent an inordinate amount of my time taping things on VHS, transferring programmes from one tape to another and repairing broken VHS’s in the collection. While my collection was substantial, it pales into insignificance compared to that of Marion Stokes who recorded every US news broadcast on the main networks and some local channels from the Iran hostage situation of 1980 through to the Sandy Hook Massacre of 2012 - largely because news items are largely unarchived but also because Stokes was drawn by the shift in narrative as a something is reported over a longer term and her own desire to get to “The Truth”. The film paints a portrait of a complex individual - an activist, librarian and one-time Communist defector to Cuba whose obsessive and demanding nature made a lot of the personal relationships in her life quite difficult. Wolf has crafted a compelling narrative with the strongest contributions being from her son Michael and three long term staff members who helped man and maintain her recording 24 hours a day. One sequence in particular which uses split screen to show how the coverage of 9/11 began to unfold in real time across multiple channels highlights the potential historical and cultural picture that an archive like this can give us.
The Bad:- It maybe glosses slightly over the overall hoarding nature of her personality, only hinting at the sheer extent of her hoarding outside the news recording (brief mention is made of nine apartments worth of stuff) but, given that the narrative is focussing on the collection, this is a minor niggle.
The Verdict:- I’ve rediscovered a fondness for documentary in the last few years and this another one to the list of docs I’ve enjoyed. It might not be up there with some of my recent favourites like After The Screaming Stops and Being Frank but it’s an intriguing portrait of a complex character.
The Venue / Intro / Q&A:- The director Matt Wolf and Marion's son Michael were in attendance and talked a bit about how the 70,000 tapes have now been taken in by Internet Archive and are in the process of being digitised for public consumption. The venue this time was the Vue West End and, in comfort terms, this may well be my new favourite cinema. Even the seats that aren’t billed as recliners do recline a bit and are super comfy. I award The Baldy Fella Seal Of Approval (not an actual thing).
* OK, fine it was exactly 2005 as I bought myself a DVD recorder in order to be able to record Doctor Who on DVD. This really should come as no surprise if you’ve been paying attention.
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