With visionary zeal, the historian/TV producer collected 70,000 hours of television news, creating a unique archive of US life
Here is the strange, but undoubtedly compelling and even heroic story of Marion Stokes, a historian and television producer from Philadelphia who from the late 70s to her death in 2012 made a continuous, unbroken 24/7 video recording of nine TV news stations. She generated a colossal archive of
American public life: tens of thousands of videocassettes that had to be stored in nine apartments.
This documentary shows Stokes to have the fanatical energy of a hoarder, the zeal of an evangelist and the intensity of a visionary. As a young woman, Stokes was a socialist, fiercely aware of her own status as an African American, which she made the point of debate in the local discussion TV show she produced in the 60s. It was there she met John Stokes, a wealthy white liberal: they married, and it was the second time around for both. Marion’s flash of insight came in the late 70s when she saw how TV news was being revolutionised. With rolling news and the new late-night news programmes, there was simply much, much more news being broadcast.