The Marion Stokes TV Archive

[TTL News 309]

Stokes' recordings has launched a movie project:

Quote

Marion Stokes was secretly recording television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today. 

Before “fake news” Marion was fighting to protect the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history. Remarkably Marion saved it, and now the Internet Archive will digitize her tapes and we’ll be able to search them online for free. 

This is a mystery in the form of a time capsule. It’s about a radical Communist activist, who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. Her work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project. 

You can find out more about the film, "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project" here.

You can access the Internet Archive of her collection ( so far ) here.

What from Stokes' collection would you be interested in seeing? Have you encountered news footage related to a historical event years later and think, "Wait, I don't remember it happening like that."

[Chris 2,182]

This is an amazing undertaking, though I'm sure when she started she never thought that some day it could be digitized and shared worldwide. 

I recall watching that 9/11 tribute concert, where Hilary Clinton came out and was boo'd. That never made it to the recorded version, I don't believe. I had the 2 tape VHS version but never did watch it to confirm. 

I'm sure the footage from 9/11 would be an interesting thing to watch. If memory serves me right, it was one of those, "We're not sure what's happening but we're gonna report it as it happens" kind of days.