Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project movie review (2019)

The montage from her tapes, culled from a daunting archive, is a record of an entire era, from news of worldwide importance, like the hostages in Iran, to the story of "Jessica McClure," the baby trapped in a well who captivated American audiences for days on end. There's footage of the Elian Gonzalez case, the Challenger explosion, or local news stories like a woman who chose to be buried with her Cadillac. Stokes did not select: she recorded it all. She noticed how small local stories were now blown up to national stories, mainly to keep the 24/7 news business going. Her final tape before she died was of the Sandy Hook massacre.

"Recorder" works on multiple levels. The Marion and John's apartment—lined with video tapes—looks like an episode of "Hoarders." Hoarding comes out of anxiety and a desire to control. Any collector understands this. The issue of "hoarding" and "collecting" has deeper elements, though, and it is in this realm that "Recorder" really resonates, especially when it addresses the importance of preservation and archiving. The fantasy is that with the internet, everything can be saved and found, everything is available. This is so far from the truth it's outrageous that people still seem to believe it. We see the fantasy that "streaming" platforms are going to be this great thing, and of course they are, but the fantasy that everything will be available is just that: a fantasy. With every advance of technology—from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming—movies have been "lost" in the process, not making the transfer. I will continue to buy physical media, since I do not trust the "landlords." 

In terms of news programming, what has happened is that if it's not on the internet, it might as well not exist at all. And so history, context, nuance, even the ability to analyze and compare and contrast, is lost. Local news stations don't have the capability to save every single segment, and in so many cases, Stokes' tapes may be the only copy. Some of these programs have never been seen since their first airing.

She kept up this pace for 35 years. Her relationships suffered. She stopped being able to go out. Why did she do this? Was she just an obsessive? Who was this gigantic archive even for? One of her assistants, interviewed in "Recorder," says he believed she did it "for the betterment of mankind." Exaggeration? I'm not so sure. Knowledge really is power and Stokes understood that. But let's not forget the most important detail: Stokes may have stopped working as a librarian early on, but once a librarian, always a librarian. This is what librarians do. They want people to be able to find information, they try to clear the way so people can find what they need. As the daughter of a librarian, the daughter, too, of a collector, I understood Stokes' drive to save, collate, organize, keep. My father passed down his obsessions to me. Stokes' work is an urgent reminder of the importance of archives, the importance of preserving those archives so that they can be made available, open to all.

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