Input

The foresight of Marion Stokes.

11 Jan

Elizabeth Horkley interviews Matt Wolf.

Librarian and communist activist Marion Stokes recorded television 24 hours per day for over 30 years, beginning with the Iran hostage crisis and ending with the Sandy Hook massacre, which occurred the day of her death. In Matt Wolf’s 2019 documentary, Recorder: the Marion Stokes Project, Wolf portrays Stokes as a complex individual, at once doggedly committed to the free flow of ideas and information and prone to binary thinking. In clips from a 1960s current affairs talk program she co-hosted, she spars with invited guests of differing ideologies. Her son recalls her saying at some point: “If I were in charge, everyone would be equal.”

As a black woman who came of age during the Civil Rights era, Stokes had ample reason to be distrustful of the powers that be. Clocking day-to-day discrepancies in the media’s coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, she resolved to start saving receipts. She hit record on her VCR in 1979 and kept it running for the rest of her life, amassing over 70,000 tapes that comprise a completionist’s archive of 30 years of television.

Since Recorder was released, Stokes’ foresight has become even more palpable. Her impulse to build an arsenal to defend against the 24/7 wildfire spread of misinformation vindicates her life’s project, to an extent. But for all of its hypothetical value to scholars and watchdogs, the sheer scale of the collection and the reality of decay (hard copies of the betamax and VHS tapes are decaying in real-time) complicate efforts to search it and preserve it. Meanwhile, generative AI has shown how Stokes’ choice of documentation—popular imagery—can be perverted to propagate false realities.

In 2023, Wolf revisited Stokes’ tapes to select stills for his new art book, Input. I spoke to Wolf about the making of Recorder and Input, Stokes’ legacy, and the reciprocal impact of media’s messaging.