- Welcome to Independent Lens .
I'm Pete Schwaba, host of PBS Wisconsin's Director's Cut .
How do you capture history?
If you're Marion Stokes, you simply hit record.
In the late 1970s, this Philadelphia
cable access producer, Communist activist,
librarian, and hoarder
started recording the news during the Iran Hostage Crisis
and didn't stop until 2012,
as she lay dying while coverage of the Sandy Hook Shooting
played on her TV.
Tonight's film is Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project .
Her story is like something out of a science fiction movie
but there is nothing fictitious about it.
Marion Stokes...
a wealthy recluse recorded TV news,
24 hours a day for over 30 years
on well over 70,000 video tapes,
cataloging the news that defined our time.
To put into perspective just how big of a collection that is,
when she passed away at the age of 83,
her son donated her video collection
to The Internet Archive in San Francisco
and it took four shipping containers
to transport all the material and cost more than $16,000.
It was at the Internet Archive where director Matt Wolf,
who has a passion for archival material, found this project.
IndieWire says Matt Wolf's remarkable film
uses Stokes' obsession
as a way to explore both herself
and the world she has literally committed to video tape.
The New York Times describes this film
as enlightening and the stuff of madness.
Wolf says only 100 of the 70,000 tapes have been digitized.
Currently, they are in the process of digitizing
all of them and making them available to the public
as Marion had wished.
They should be done in about oh...
65,000 more tapes.
Patience, my friends.
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project starts now
on PBS Wisconsin, your home for independent film.