Trailer description:
For over 30 years, Marion Stokes obsessively and privately recorded American television news twenty-four hours a day. A civil rights-era radical who became fabulously wealthy and reclusive later in life, her obsession started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979—at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 as the Sandy Hook massacre played on television while Marion passed away. In between, Marion filled 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today and in the process tell us who we were.
A mystery in the form of a time capsule, RECORDER delves into the strange life of a woman for whom home taping was a form of activism to protect the truth (the public didn’t know it, but the networks had been disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history) and though her visionary and maddening project nearly tore her family apart, her extraordinary legacy is priceless.
Official website for the documentary: https://recorderfilm.com/ (scroll down for a list of places to buy, rent, or stream the movie)
If you have access to Kanopy through your local library, you may be able to watch Recorder for free: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/recorder-marion-stokes-project?frontend=kui
Interview with the director of the documentary: https://theoutline.com/post/7370/recorder-documentary-marion-stokes-interview-matt-wolf
Wikipedia article for Marion Stokes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes