Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
In 1979, a woman named Marion Stokes started recording live television and didn’t stop for more than 33 years. Director Matt Wolf is making a movie about Stokes and her archive.
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.
The Internet Archive is supposedly archiving them and putting them online (so says this 2013 Fast Company article) but there’s no evidence that any of the videos are live on the site. (Rights issues? Budget?) In the meantime, you can check out this Tumblr has a collection of stills from the Stokes tapes.
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