379. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project; movie review

 

 

RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT

Cert TBA

87 mins

BBFC advice: TBA

In around 1957 or 58, my dad was awarded the Queen's Scout honour at Windsor Castle and he tells me the ceremony was recorded on television.

Alas, I will never know for sure.

Last year I found on Youtube footage of when I reported on the return of the FA Cup to my home city because I had been caught by a TV camera.

That was a wonderful moment because I thought the evidence had been lost.

Marion Stokes believed all such moments should be preserved, so recorded every programme, local and national, that she could for nearly 35 years.

As Matt Wolf's documentary shows, after a few initial forays with her Betamax a couple of years earlier, Stokes began recording American television 24 hours a day in 1979 during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

Her gargantuan effort ended on December 14, 2012, and poignantly the Sandy Hook school massacre played on television as she 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. 

Wolf's film delves into the strange life of a radical Communist activist who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. 

It includes television appearances of her own during which she was involved in deep philosophical debates about society.

It was while producing these shows that she met John Stokes, fell in love and he left his children for her.

Both of his daughters are interviewed as is Marion's son, Michael at length.

They conceded that Marion was very clever but an oddball who had no time for fripperies in what she considered a serious world.

In other words, there was no space for them.

Marion's personal assistant, secretary and driver all became close to her during her dotage and tell how they helped her continue her zealous videotaping.

Documentary-makers come up with myriad weird and wonderful stories. This is certainly one of the strangest and, therefore, one of the most compelling.

Reasons to watch: Insight into one woman and the news media over 35 years

Reasons to avoid: Inevitably flicks around too much

Laughs: None

Jumps: None

Vomit: None

Nudity: None

Overall rating: 7/10

Did you know? Charles Ginsberg, a researcher at Ampex Corporation, invented the videotape recorder in 1951. The contraption worked by taking live images from cameras and converting them into electrical impulses stored on magnetic tape. Ampex sold the first videotape recorder for $50,000 in 1956. By 1971, Sony began marketing the first at-home VCRs. 

The final word. Matt Wolf: "We only digitised 100 of 70,000 tapes, so we hardly scratched the surface. VHS is a delicate and disintegrating medium and the more time that passes, the more precarious Marion’s collection becomes, so I think the Internet Archive has a monumental task ahead of them but they share that same conviction that there’s incredible value in this collection and that it begs to be made accessible for free to the public as Marion had wished." Moveablefest

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