I recently made a mini documentary called The Woman Who Recorded Everything, which told the story of Marion Stokes, a lady who recorded cable news 24 hours a day over a period of around 35 years from 1977. It’s a fascinating story, and while doing my research I came across a full length documentary called Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
Here’s the official description of the film:
For over 30 years, Marion Stokes obsessively and privately recorded American television news 24 hours a day filling 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing wars, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today.
The work that Stokes did turned out to be very important. You see, it turns out that TV stations were not in the habit of keeping their records long term. So in a lot of cases Stokes’ recordings are all that exist of these news programs. The entire archive is now with The Internet Archive and provides a deep resource and record of our history.
Rather than focusing on this though, the documentary has a laser focus on Stokes and the way she lived her life, how she treated others, and how she was stubborn and reclusive and obsessive. This is all well and good, but it forms the bulk of the narrative. Imagine if you sat down to learn about the important work that, say, Einstein did, but instead of learning about his work and the results of it, you spent the bulk of the time learning about his thoughts on butterflies. This film is about Marion Stokes, and not so much about the work of Marion Stokes. As such, it is, and I say this with the utmost respect to Stokes’ memory, quite boring. It’s a number of family members and staff going “yeah so she was quite weird”.
There is a section about an hour in that shows the kind of thing I was expecting to see in this. There is a panel of four screens showing four different channels, and in real time you see how the news slowly began to hit each channel on the morning of September 11, 2001. Seeing programs get cut into with the breaking news and within 5mins all of the channels picking it up, and it was so early in the event that it was still thought it was an accident. This is what I expected from this documentary, not the story of Marion’s life. This could have more accurately been called The Life and Times of Marion Stokes.
So this was a bit of a miss for me. Perhaps this is my own fault for going into it with certain expectations, but I failed to make a connection to the story they present.
Sierra Kilo Bravo 