# Key source extracts — Recorder / Marion Stokes

## Official film page
- Marion Stokes was secretly recording television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years.
- Official film copy says it started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis and ended on December 14, 2012 while Sandy Hook coverage played as she passed away.
- The official film page describes about 70,000 VHS tapes and says the recordings captured news, wars, revolutions, lies, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows and commercials.
- It says the Internet Archive would digitize the tapes and make them searchable online for free.
- It describes the film as a mystery/time capsule about a radical Communist activist who became a wealthy recluse archivist.
- The page says the film premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, played Hot Docs and London Film Festival, was distributed theatrically by Zeitgeist Films, broadcast on PBS Independent Lens, and was released in the UK by Violet Pictures.

## Internet Archive / search trail
- Search snippets identify the Marion Stokes collection as documents related to Marion Stokes (1929–2012), civil-rights activist, feminist and news archivist.
- Search snippets and archive pages connect the collection to Archive.org’s Marion Stokes video/papers holdings.

## TikTok lead
- Caption: “Discover the incredible story of Marion Stokes, who recorded 71,716 tapes to preserve history as it happened...”
- Transcript states: “There’s a documentary called Recorder, the Marion Stokes Project...” and summarizes 30 years of nonstop TV recording, multiple VCRs, channels such as CNN/Fox/C-SPAN, talk shows, commercials, nine apartments, Apple products/investment and a belief that the archive could preserve truth.