Film the present so that tomorrow the past doesn't change

On December 14, 2012, as the first images of a school shooting began to dominate screens across the United States, several VCRs were still recording in an apartment in Philadelphia. It was Sandy Hook. Marion Stokes was dying that same day.

For more than thirty years, I had been living in sync with those machines. Televisions turned on, videotapes going in and out, handwritten labels, schedules, channels, dates. When one tape reached its end, another had to be inserted. Marion's death finally interrupted that mechanical routine: only then did the recorders turn off.

Behind there were more than 70,000 VHS and Betamax tapes containing hundreds of thousands of hours of American television. The major news events were, of course, included, but there were also commercials, interviews, transmission errors, local news, forgotten speeches, hosts improvising in the face of disaster, and future celebrities when they were still unknown. Those unremarkable seconds, which no network deemed necessary to preserve, were also recorded.

A solitary woman had built, without intending to establish any institution, an external memory of the United States.

The Ministry of Truth, in reverse

It is difficult to know the story of Marion Stokes without thinking of 1984. Orwell formulated one of the most uncomfortable political equations of the 20th century there: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Winston Smith works in a ministry dedicated to correcting records. Orwellian totalitarianism is not satisfied with imposing a lie in the present: it needs the archives to retroactively confirm that lie. A newspaper is corrected, a failed prediction ceases to have failed, a purged individual ceases to have existed. The past is not debated: it is replaced.

Marion did exactly the opposite, on her domestic and obsessive scale. Her method could be summed up as follows: do not correct; do not select too much; do not trust completely. Record. Save.

There was an almost rudimentary intuition in this, and precisely for that reason, it was powerful. If a material copy of what was said and shown survives, it will be harder to assert tomorrow that it never happened. Stokes died before deepfakes, before generative artificial intelligence, and before our contemporary epidemic of "disinformation," but he understood a question that preceded all those technologies: television was not just about recounting reality. It also helped to fabricate it.

Marion before the tapes

Marion Marguerite Butler was born on November 25, 1929, in Germantown, Philadelphia. She was an African American woman born in a country still organized by racial segregation. She studied at the Philadelphia High School for Girls and worked for many years at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The biographical coincidence seems to have been written afterward: before becoming a compulsive television archivist, she had been a librarian.

She was not, however, a librarian removed from political noise. She participated in the civil rights movement and in the campaign for the integration of Girard College, which had excluded African American students for decades. In 1963, she helped organize five buses from Philadelphia to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Her obituary also notes her as one of the founding board members of the National Organization for Women.

Settling in Cuba

For a Cuban reader, there is an episode that is impossible to overlook. In the early 1960s, Marion Stokes chaired the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Philadelphia, an organization created in the United States after 1959 to oppose American policy against Fidel Castro's new government.

His proximity to Cuba was not a tourist sympathy nor a fleeting progressive reflection. Stokes was then involved in the realm of the American communist left and even attempted to settle on the Island. According to his son Michael Metelits in Recorder, Marion, his first husband, Melvin Metelits, and the young Michael traveled to Mexico with the intention of obtaining authorization to enter Cuba. They were unsuccessful. Marion ultimately returned to the United States with her son.

That activism came at a cost. Michael Metelits claims that the FBI monitored his mother and opened a file on her; he also links her departure from her job as a librarian to that activism. The historical irony is too good to overlook: a woman who sympathized with a revolution that would ultimately manage public information with extreme vigilance later devoted three decades to distrusting those who handled memory.

There is no need to turn that irony into a perfectly traceable ideological conversion. Perhaps Marion changed; perhaps she changed less than it seems. It may be that the constant was something else: a fierce distrust of any version that seeks to be the only available version.

Before recording for television, Marion worked in television

Between the late sixties and early seventies, Marion and her second husband, John Stokes Jr., produced a Sunday program called Input in Philadelphia. It was an unruly talk show for the local television of that time. Conservatives and radicals, Black and white, believers and atheists could all be found there. Topics included racism, birth control, pollution, violence, and student protests.

An article from 1968 joked that the program was so intense it should be called Output. Beyond the joke, that experience matters: Marion experienced television from the inside. She knew that a broadcast wasn’t a neutral window, but rather a collection of decisions: camera angles, editing, duration, guests, hierarchies, silences. Those who select decide what enters the public present. Those who archive decide what can return from the past.

1979: the permanent news

The legendary origin of its archive is often placed in the crisis of American hostages in Iran. On November 4, 1979, Iranian students occupied the United States embassy in Tehran. The crisis would last 444 days and change, among many other things, the way American television handled current events.

ABC began airing a nightly program dedicated to covering the conflict day by day. From that formula, Nightline was born. Marion realized that the landscape of the medium was changing: news was no longer just a segment at a set time, but rather began to demand a constant presence.

Soon after, CNN would arrive. Over the years, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, and the constant streaming landscape that now seems natural to us would follow. Television no longer just needed to report what had happened; it needed to prove that something was always happening. Marion Stokes decided to record that transformation. And she decided to capture it all.

A house turned into a watch station

At first, there was one or two machines. Then three, four, six. It reached the point of having up to eight video recorders operating at the same time.

Each television followed a channel. Each tape had a finite duration. When it ended, someone had to be there to replace it. Family life began to organize itself around a technical limitation of the VHS: six or eight hours of respite, and then, once again, the change of cassette. Rec.

Travel, dinners, and commitments could be subordinated to that schedule. Over time, family members and employees collaborated. The accumulation ceased to be a private habit of one woman and transformed into a small domestic infrastructure for media monitoring.

When Matt Wolf began to rebuild the archive for his documentary, he discovered that the former librarian had left a remarkable amount of written metadata about the cassettes: dates, times, channels, and sometimes names or events: Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, the police bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia.

More than fifty volunteers later helped transcribe those labels. However, neither Marion's discipline nor the family properties were sufficient anymore. The tapes filled apartments and storage units. Atlas Obscura reported about 71,000 VHS and Betamax units originally distributed across various locations. Viewed today, the collection appears less like an archive and more like a geology: layers upon layers of recorded time.

What the chains threw away

We have become accustomed to imagining that everything ever broadcast sleeps somewhere in a cloud and can be retrieved with a search. Analog television didn’t operate that way. Storage cost money and space; tapes could be reused; formats became obsolete; many local stations had no commercial reason to keep entire decades of programming. A significant portion of what was broadcast simply disappeared.

There lies the paradox that makes Stokes' archive indispensable. While she filled rooms with tapes, the television companies themselves discarded parts of what they had produced. A private woman preserved materials that their broadcasters did not deem worthy of remembrance. Her supposed obsession, viewed several decades later, takes on a different status.

The eccentric accumulator becomes an archivist. What once seemed like domestic pathology begins to be interpreted as cultural politics.

It didn't just record History

Marion didn't just record elections, wars, murders, or attacks. She captured television. The difference is essential. There remained a weather forecast and a detergent commercial; a thirty-second news clip and a forgotten interview; the typography of a channel, the attire of a host, the price of a car, a word that later fell out of use. Everything solemn was tainted by the banal, which is precisely how we receive reality when we still don't know which part of it will become History.

That's why the tapes are more than just a journalistic archive. They serve as an archaeological site of American audiovisual life. A researcher can study how AIDS was discussed in 1985 and, on the same tape, what medications were being advertised during the break. One can follow the coverage of the Gulf War and find themselves twenty minutes later with Kellogg’s selling cereal.

Propaganda, consumption, fear, entertainment, and everyday life survive intertwined in the order in which they were received. This continuity holds a value that a later anthology could never replicate: it eliminates, or at least reduces, retrospective selection.

We now know which events from 1987 turned out to be "important." The viewer in 1987 could not have known this. Marion's archive also preserves that ignorance. It retains a present that is still innocent of its future.

September 11, 2001: witnessing the birth of a version

September 11, 2001 allows us to better understand that force. During a catastrophe, the first reports come in fragmented. Presenters speculate, witnesses contradict each other, authorities make corrections, and images emerge before a stable vocabulary exists to explain them.

A few hours later, a narrative begins to take shape. Days later, a chronology emerges. Years later, we talk about "history" as if it had existed that way, complete, from the very first moment.

Stokes' tapes allow us to return to the period before that stabilization. Matt Wolf uses parallel broadcasts from 9/11 in Recorder to show how different networks reacted in real time. The archive does not prove, on its own, that anyone lied. It does something perhaps more useful: it reveals how a society builds certainty from chaos.

The archivist who also accumulated the future

Marion Stokes was fascinated with Apple. She compulsively purchased Macintosh computers; many remained sealed in their boxes. Matt Wolf recalls entering her old apartment and finding hundreds of them still unused.

He had invested early in Apple stocks and made significant profits from them. That money sustained an increasingly expensive household: tapes, devices, repairs, storage, apartments. The coincidence has a bit of a technological fable to it. While he was focused on preserving the analog age of magnetic tape, Marion was also accumulating the machines that heralded its replacement. VHS and Macintosh coexisted in the same rooms.

Genius or hoarder?

It also kept books, newspapers, magazines, computers, and all sorts of objects. The project had familial costs that no heroic narrative should erase. Those who lived with Marion had to adapt to rituals, schedules, and demands arising from a controlling and obsessive personality.

The Recorder is correct in neither absolving her nor diagnosing her from a distance. It allows both sides to coexist. A private obsession can hurt those around it while simultaneously producing an extraordinary public legacy. Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian that the entire project could even be seen as a gigantic conceptual artwork.

The idea isn't far-fetched. It would be enough to imagine the title of the installation: "No Pause Button: 33 Years of Imperial Television"…

The last day

Marion Stokes died on December 14, 2012, at the age of 83. On that same day, Adam Lanza killed twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. In Philadelphia, Marion's televisions remained on.

Also the video recorders. Sandy Hook entered the tapes after Iran, Reagan, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, Rodney King, O. J. Simpson, the Clinton sex scandal, the 2000 elections, September 11, Iraq, and Obama. The time recording machine managed to capture the news that coincided with the death of its creator.

Later, her son Michael turned off the equipment. For the first time in decades, those apartments were left in silence.

Four containers headed to California

There was a question that was much less metaphysical: what to do with such a large quantity of tapes?

Michael Metelits inherited the collection and sought an institution capable of receiving it. The answer came from Internet Archive, the nonprofit organization founded by Brewster Kahle, which is responsible for the Wayback Machine, perhaps one of the contemporary projects that best embodies the old utopia of preserving the public memory of the Internet.

Moving the file was already an industrial-scale operation: thousands of boxes, pallets, trucks. The tapes traveled from Philadelphia to California in four containers. Internet Archive accepted what few institutions would have wanted to accept: a mountain of analog material whose value could only be unlocked by slowly converting it into data.

The second project Marion Stokes

Storing 70,000 videotapes does not mean they have been saved. Magnetic tape deteriorates, players become obsolete, belts rot, and heads fail. Every format has an expiration date that is rarely printed on the box. Truly preserving the archive requires playing each tape and converting its analog signal into a digital file. One by one. Hour by hour.

The process was estimated to cost millions of dollars and required many years of work. More than a decade after the collection arrived at Internet Archive, the comprehensive digitization is still not complete. The project continues to be hindered by something as mundane as it is decisive: the cost.

This means that the approximately 71,000 tapes cannot yet be fully accessed online. Internet Archive maintains the collection and has published a portion of it, but the complete recovery remains a monumental task. Furthermore, with each passing year, both the tapes and the machines capable of playing them age simultaneously.

From VHS to a searchable memory

The completion of the project would not merely be about converting analog images into digital ones. It would be about turning television into something searchable. A VHS tape is nearly silent for anyone who doesn’t know what it contains: if someone asks what a certain politician said in Philadelphia on the night of May 7, 1984, you first have to physically locate the right tape and then find the specific minute.

Digitalization changes that logic. Closed captioning, voice recognition, and automatic transcription can transform hundreds of thousands of hours into indexable text. A search such as “Donald Trump 1984 USFL” can lead directly to the segment. Among the processed pieces, there has actually appeared an interview with a 38-year-old Trump speaking as the owner of the New Jersey Generals.

Marion had saved images. The 21st century is starting to turn them into a database of the 20th century.

Recorder

In 2019, Matt Wolf brought this story to the screen with Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and later circulated through festivals, museums, theaters, and PBS Independent Lens.

Her best decision is to resist the moral. Marion is not presented as sanctified as “the woman who saved television,” but she is also not reduced to an eccentric buried under mountains of VHS tapes. Wolf reconstructs a difficult, radical, intelligent, contradictory, and fiercely private woman.

The critical reception was excellent. Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 95% approval rating. But there’s something more intriguing than any percentage: to tell Marion's story, the filmmaker had to immerse himself precisely in the universe she had captured. The archive ultimately acted as a mirror for its own archivist.

Marion against the algorithm

In 2026, the story of Stokes is more unsettling than ever, just as it was when the documentary premiered. Our relationship with memory has changed in both medium and ownership.

Marion physically owned her tapes. We barely possess what we see. A publication can vanish, an account can be suspended, a video can be deleted, a company can shut down, a platform can change its rules, a search engine can stop indexing a page. Sometimes, all it takes is a business decision or an algorithm change for a piece of reality to stop being accessible to us.

We have transferred a significant portion of our collective memory to private servers whose main mission is not to preserve history, but to provide services and generate revenue. Viewed from this perspective, that jungle of VHS tapes loses some of its absurdity. The tape was heavy, fragile, and clumsy, but it had a formidable advantage: it was present. It could not be taken down remotely.

Cuba, once again

For a Cuban, Marion's story inevitably opens another door. Authoritarian regimes understand all too well the value of archives. Photographs are altered, names disappear, speeches are reedited, newspapers are withdrawn, and what was once official becomes inaccessible. The narrative changes without acknowledging that it has changed.

Democracies, of course, are not free from forgetfulness, propaganda, or manipulation either. The crucial difference is not to imagine pure societies versus deceitful ones. It is to ask how many versions can coexist at the same time, who can preserve them, and who has the right to revisit them.

That is why Stokes' political biography resonates so peculiarly with Cuba. The young supporter of the Revolution ended up creating, tape by tape, a work that is incompatible with any state monopoly on memory. Her final method could be summarized in a way that no totalitarian bureaucracy tolerates very well: preserve everything possible and let others look at it later. Even against ourselves.

A new profession: witness

Most of us turn on a screen to find out what’s happening. Marion also seemed to look towards a spectator who did not yet exist: a future historian, a journalist, an artist, a citizen trying to verify a statement. Someone who one day would ask, with the basic distrust of someone who no longer fully believes in the memories of others: “Did they really say that…?!”

Her response was not a theory about the media. It was a practice. Press Rec. Change the tape. Press Rec again. Repeat the gesture for years, until a house ceased to look like a house and became the physical memory of a televised country.

The Impossible File

Marion died without witnessing the second life of her project. While she was alive, that collection was immense and almost unusable. She had managed to preserve the information, but not to make it truly accessible. That is the greatest irony of any private archive: it can save something from oblivion while simultaneously hiding it beneath its own volume.

The second mission now belongs to Internet Archive, to the technicians who rescue magnetic signals, to those who program indexes, and to researchers who will uncover materials that perhaps Marion herself never saw again. An insignificant commercial, a statement that is now compromising, a forgotten coverage, someone who appeared in front of a camera for thirty seconds and then vanished.

We don’t know what all of that will be used for. Precisely for that reason, it is worthwhile to preserve it. Good archives are not built because we know the questions of the future, but because we understand that the future will pose questions that we have not yet thought of.

The woman who did not trust in forgetfulness

Orwell imagined a State that destroyed the evidence of its own contradictions. Marion Stokes established the reverse operation: a Ministry of Memory without officials or public budget, private, disorganized, extremely expensive, analog, obsessive. A ministry spread across apartments in Philadelphia and built with televisions, cables, adhesive labels, and VCRs that could not rest.

Perhaps she exaggerated the danger. Perhaps she understated it. Today, photographs can be altered within seconds, voices are synthesized, videos can be fabricated, and entire archives depend on companies that could disappear tomorrow. Marion's intuition no longer seems like a peculiar trait of a collector, but rather a warning: historical truth requires a memory stable enough to contradict us.

For 33 years, while millions of people turned on their televisions to find out what was happening and others pressed Play to watch a rented movie, Marion Stokes made a less spectacular gesture, one that, viewed from today, seems quite unsettling: she pressed Record. This African American woman, born in 1929, thus anticipated a central anxiety of the 21st century: that the issue would not only be knowing what is happening now but also being able to prove, to anyone who denies it, what happened before that brought us to this point.