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This Philadelphia woman recorded three decades of television on 70,000 VHS tapes
by Gary Thompson, Updated: June 21, 2019
She mistrusted media but recorded it obsessively for 30 years, created a close-knit surrogate family but led another to become estranged, and was a card-carrying communist who bought Apple stock at $7 and made a fortune.
How to explain the many contradictions of Marion Stokes, the Philadelphia woman who died in 2012 in a luxury apartment, surrounded by three decades of taped television and 40,000 books?
An excellent start is the documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, an engrossing look at her unusual life — an African American woman of humble Philly origins who ended up wealthy, reclusive, and living above Rittenhouse Square at a tony address, where she started recording TV round-the-clock in 1979 and didn’t stop until she died in 2012. According to a 2013 Inquirer story, she had filled roughly 70,000 videocassettes with about a million hours of programming.
On Friday, June 28, director Matt Wolf will host a screening of the film at the Lightbox Film Center. In attendance (and part of a post-screening discussion) will be some of the friends, family and associates featured in the documentary, which examines currents in Stokes’ life that converged in her desire to compile an unprecedented (and unmatched) stockpile of television content. Her recordings are in the hands of the Internet Archive in California, which is digitizing them to create a searchable database of incredible reach — incredible because the affiliates and networks often do not keep the tapes, so it is an invaluable, one-of-a-kind resource.
Full Article:
https://www.inquirer.com/entertainm...ocumentary-philadelphia-vhs-vcr-20190621.html
Information on the collection and a forthcoming film:
https://recorderfilm.com
by Gary Thompson, Updated: June 21, 2019
She mistrusted media but recorded it obsessively for 30 years, created a close-knit surrogate family but led another to become estranged, and was a card-carrying communist who bought Apple stock at $7 and made a fortune.
How to explain the many contradictions of Marion Stokes, the Philadelphia woman who died in 2012 in a luxury apartment, surrounded by three decades of taped television and 40,000 books?
An excellent start is the documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, an engrossing look at her unusual life — an African American woman of humble Philly origins who ended up wealthy, reclusive, and living above Rittenhouse Square at a tony address, where she started recording TV round-the-clock in 1979 and didn’t stop until she died in 2012. According to a 2013 Inquirer story, she had filled roughly 70,000 videocassettes with about a million hours of programming.
On Friday, June 28, director Matt Wolf will host a screening of the film at the Lightbox Film Center. In attendance (and part of a post-screening discussion) will be some of the friends, family and associates featured in the documentary, which examines currents in Stokes’ life that converged in her desire to compile an unprecedented (and unmatched) stockpile of television content. Her recordings are in the hands of the Internet Archive in California, which is digitizing them to create a searchable database of incredible reach — incredible because the affiliates and networks often do not keep the tapes, so it is an invaluable, one-of-a-kind resource.
Full Article:
https://www.inquirer.com/entertainm...ocumentary-philadelphia-vhs-vcr-20190621.html
Information on the collection and a forthcoming film:
https://recorderfilm.com