Cinema Seminar: RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT is a History of Media Narratives
By: Ray Lobo
Tags: Features, Documentary, Blm, Movies, Recorder

Cinema Seminar: RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT is a History of Media Narratives

image in IMDB.com

Marion Stokes recorded thirty-five years of news footage from 1977 to 2012. Her VHS and Betamax archive filled her nine properties and three additional storage units. Stokes’ outings were time restricted. Tapes had to be replaced every few hours so as to not miss a second of news footage. To an outsider, her behavior may have appeared as a mania, an eccentric woman constrained by the strict demands of her obsession. The documentary Recorder corrects that superficial impression of Stokes. For Stokes, taping was a form of activism, a genealogical fact-check on the American narrative. Stokes recorded local news reports, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. She read eleven newspapers a day. She was the antithesis of those caught in today’s social media information bubbles.

Recorder’s director, Matt Wolf, interweaves the personal with the political. Wolf’s Recorder lays out the many ways in which Stokes was an outsider. Stokes was, to borrow a contemporary term, intersectional — African American, a woman, and a communist. She was spied on by the FBI and fired from her job as a librarian. After her firing, she recreated herself into a producer and panelist on a show for Philadelphia public access. The show dealt with social and political issues. It being a local public access show, its reach was far from vast. As an African American woman with limited power and political influence, Stokes quickly realized that her calling should shift toward recording media narratives. If the narratives that dominate history and the mainstream media are written by history’s “winners,” Stokes was determined to record precisely those narratives. Her idea was that if she recorded for long enough, she could catch the slips, the inconsistencies in the ideologies manufactured by the “winners.”

Photo by anOnymOnOus in Flickr

Stokes’ recordings take the viewer on a tour of newsworthy events and how some of those events were pruned and curated in order to present a digestible narrative for the American public. The recordings remind us that breaking news reports identified US hostages in the Iran Hostage Crisis as possible CIA agents — that identification was quickly altered in subsequent news reports. Was this an honest misidentification, or an early slip in a narrative that required pruning? We do not know for sure; but Stokes’ recordings caught the inconsistency. Stokes’ recorded footage reminds us that ABC’s Nightline began four days after the Iran Hostage Crisis and originated as an effort to not only report on the day-to-day of the crisis, but as a ratings competitor against The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The real-life human drama and TV spectacle that was the Hostage Crisis held viewers transfixed and entertained. The thornier foreign policy story of CIA interference in Iran — US involvement in the overthrow of the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the US installation of the Shah’s brutal regime, and the resentment many Iranians felt toward US interference in Iranian affairs — that narrative was not as entertaining for Americans, and not as capable of obtaining ratings big enough to compete against Johnny Carson.

Photo by Pashtun Afghan in Flickr

CNN was launched shortly after the Iran Hostage Crisis. The Iran Hostage Crisis was a Zeus from whose head were born CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and numerous other offspring. Stokes could now monitor the molding of public opinion from multiple cable channels over hours and hours of programming. It is eerie how some news stories from the early days of cable news in the 80s and 90s recur in slightly different form today. The Iran Contra affair smells familiarly rotten, familiarly Trumpian. The breathless coverage of Clinton’s impeachment is virtually the same theatrical performance as the Trump impeachment, except with different actors. The Exxon Valdez oil spill is a precursor to the many human triggered catastrophes in the natural world. US support in the form of weapons and intelligence for mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan is a link in the chain of events connected to the September 11 attacks and the US war in Afghanistan. And, for those today who minimize the history of brutality upon black bodies, Recorder’s footage of the Rodney King beating and the killing of Arthur McDuffie by Miami police officers should enlighten today’s younger minimizers, and help us call out today’s older minimizers for their willful amnesia of the pain of others.

Stokes was no mere hoarder. She was a TV news librarian. We should not forget that in the pre-internet age, TV stations would routinely throw out old tapes. Stokes’ news archive is an effort to recover the details, the aromas, the fine minerals contained in the soil of history. Recorder, in a strange way, shares themes with Kubrick’s The Shining. The Overlook Hotel was built on top of a Native American burial ground — the hotel a paving over of America’s brutal domestic history. Recorder and Stokes’ archive are an attempt to remind us of the buried poisons underneath American narratives. Stokes’ project is a prod to all of us to always look for the loose stitching in media narratives. Recording those loose stitches, now more than ever, is of utmost urgency.

Watch it at Amazon:

If you enjoy reading Cinapse, purchasing items through our affiliate links can tip us with a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Further reading: