Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Matt Wolf about Marion Stokes and the Television news in [the United States|television news] archive she created.

Summary

Stokes captured 840,000 hours of news footage over the course of 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012; the VHS and Betamax video recordings were donated to the Internet Archive.
The Iran hostage crisis, which lasted from 1979 to 1981, made Stokes decide to make her project a round-the-clock job due to its continuous development as it happened.

Release and reception

The film premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was released and distributed by Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber. It was also submitted for Academy Award for [Best Documentary Feature|Oscar consideration]. A book featuring imagery compiled by Wolf from more than seven hundred hours of Stokes's tapes, titled Input, was published in Fall of 2023.
The film has rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The site's critical consensus reads, "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Story uses one person's singular quest to illuminate the blurred line between brilliance and obsession."

Home media

The DVD and Blu-ray were released on March 10, 2020.
A VHS edition of the documentary was released by Lunchmeat VHS in 2023.