Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Who gets to record history? Who gets to define what is history? Who gets to keep and preserve it? Join the Penn State Libraries’ Community Archives Pilot Project to consider these questions with a free screening of Matt Wolf’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. For more than 30 years, starting with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979 and ending with the Sandy Hook school massacre late in 2012, Marion Stokes secretly recorded American television 24 hours a day for 30 years from 1975 until her death in 2012. For Marion, taping was a form of activism to seek the truth and she believed that a comprehensive archive of the media would one day be invaluable. The Philadelphia woman captured the revolutions, wars, triumphs, and catastrophes that illuminate who we are and how TV has shaped the world in which we live today. Her visionary project nearly tore her family apart, but now her 70,000 VHS tapes are being digitized for future generations.