Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project | |
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Directed by | Matt Wolf |
Produced by |
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Cinematography |
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Edited by | Keiko Deguchi |
Music by | Owen Pallett |
Release date |
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Running time | 87 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $54,566 [1] [2] |
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Matt Wolf about Marion Stokes [3] and the television news archive she created. [4] [5] [6]
Stokes captured 840,000 hours of news footage over the course of 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012; [7] [8] the VHS and Betamax video recordings were donated to the Internet Archive. [9] [10] [11] [12]
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. [13] [14] [15]
The film premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was released and distributed by Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber. [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] It was also submitted for Oscar consideration. [21]
The film has a 95% 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." [22]
The DVD and Blu-ray were released on March 10, 2020. [23]
A VHS edition of the documentary was released by Lunchmeat VHS in 2023. [24]
Zeitgeist Films is a New York-based distribution company founded in 1988 which acquires and distributes films from the U.S. and around the world. In 2017, Zeitgeist entered into a multi-year strategic alliance with film distributor Kino Lorber.
Kino Lorber is an international film distribution company based in New York City. Founded in 1977, it was originally known as Kino International until it was acquired by and merged into Lorber HT Digital in 2009. It specializes in art house films, such as documentary films, classic and rarely seen films from earlier periods in the history of cinema, and world cinema. In addition to theatrical distribution, Kino Lorber releases films in the home entertainment market and has its own streaming services for its digital library.
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Input was a Sunday morning public access talk show co-produced by Marion Stokes and her husband John that aired locally in Philadelphia from 1967 to 1971.
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Marion Marguerite Stokes was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for hoarding and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units. According to The Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."
Matt Wolf is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and producer. His notable films include Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Teenage, Bayard & Me,Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, and Spaceship Earth. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. His subjects include youth culture, artists, archives, music, and queer history.
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