Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

“Wolf’s strange, sad and finally exhilarating portrait is one of radical consumerism turned into a searchable legacy — the viewer as activist.”~Los Angeles Times

Aroview: Extraordinary documentary about the TV producer and historian Marion Stokes and her vast collection of home recorded American news clips, which form a unique cultural archive spanning three decades and 70,000 VHS and Betamax tapes.

As a socialist and an African American, Stokes' collection, which had to be stored in nine apartments, paints a picture of American public life without the editing and curation of relatively brief news programmes, which favoured "importance" over the voices of working people and people of colour. A fascinating reflection on the nature of media and of a reclusive artist.