Thoughts on Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

    On Criterion, I rewatched Matt Wolf's 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a film about a Philadelphia-area civil right activist and librarian named Marion Stokes, who recorded American television, like news programs, commercials, sitcoms and talk shows, twenty-four hours a day, from 1979, the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, to her death in 2012, the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre. She was capturing the beginnings of the twenty-four hour news cycle, and capturing wars and tragedies and cultural milestones, like the aforementioned hostage crisis, the Challenger disaster, the Baby Jessica rescue, the O.J. Simpson trial, the reactions to the Rodney King beating and the race rebellion in L.A., 9/11 and how different news channels were grasping the events as it happened, and many other major American news stories.

 

   I had seen this film on PBS years ago in 2020, and really liked it a lot, liking how she was both an activist who was involved in Philadelphia civil rights organizations, appearing on local TV chat shows, and was also a librarian, a former member of the Communist Party, and a cultural historian. She had this quiet assertiveness to her that I really liked, and chronicling American television history with her more than 70,000 VHS tapes, which were donated to the Internet Archive after her death to be digitized and preserved online. Her dedication may have been obsessive, and caused rifts in her family, but her background as a librarian and an activist made her personal project extremely vital to archiving cultural history through television, and educating audiences long after her passing.  

    She had a great eye for predicting trends, and when Apple came out with the Macintosh computer, she not only bought many Macs, she also invested in Apple when it was a fledgling company, and became wealthy through her life from her smart investments in the company. 

    As a fun aside, she was also a major fan of the original Star Trek, liking how the show depicted a multi-national, multi-racial group working together to understand other cultures, and she saw the Federation as socialism, which appealed to her personal beliefs. The film ends on a lovely shot of her sitting in one of the Enterprise's chairs in a museum reconstruction of the show's set.

    The director Matt Wolf also made the documentaries Spaceship Earth (2020), about a collective who built and lived in the Biosphere II in 1991, being both seen as environmental visionaries and a possible cult, and Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), about the multi-talented cellist and composer Arthur Russell, bridging pop and classical music and creating disco records. On Criterion, I watched two of his short films: Another Hayride (2021), about the new age guru Louise Hay, who taught self-love workshops to people with AIDS during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, fostering community, love, and support even if her methods to claim to cure AIDS were questionable; and The Face of AIDS (2016), about the controversial photograph of AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed with his family, which was used as a Benetton ad to spread awareness, which led to discussions about a corporation using the AIDS epidemic for capitalistic reasons and AIDS activists being split on the decision with the photo's publicity. Wolf is an incredibly talented documentarian with a variety of subjects in his films, with a thoughtful eye and a deep research in archival material, and I look forward to seeing more of his films.