Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Director: Matt Wolf

2019 / 87min

For 30 years, Marion Stokes, the African American left-wing activist and archivist, secretly recorded television 24 hours a day. Her project began with the Iran Hostage Crisis and ended upon her death some 70,000 tapes later. Capturing revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today, the Philadelphia-based Stokes’s stated intention was to protect the truth while the television networks were carelessly throwing away their own archives. Packed with unexpected twists and unbelievable footage, Wolf’s film is a sensitive portrait of a woman who was both a prickly, obsessive eccentric and a tireless media watchdog, one eye always opened for mediated falsehoods.

Introduction and Q&A with director Matt Wolf and Matt Connors (Pre-Echo Press) moderated by Doreen St. Félix on Sunday, November 19th

Book launch event for INPUT (Pre-Echo Press, 2023) will precede the screening and take place in the Metrograph Lobby