Marion, who? Marion Stokes. Unfamiliar with the name? So was I until I saw the trailer for the film, which prompted me to want to check it out.
I've now seen it and what I can say is this: Ms. Stokes was not your average hoarder. For starters, she was clean and orderly. Moreover, she didn't collect junk but rather items of use and value. Specifically, Marion loved to accumulate practically anything media-related: books, newspapers, videotapes, computers. Keep in mind, all this started for her in the 1970s and '80s, back when the average household had not a single PC or VHS machine in the home.
An eccentric, you say? Case in point: Here was a lady of whom it is said owned a collection of videocassettes totaling 70,000, or thereabouts. That's a seven followed by four zeroes. These were blank tapes used to video-record multiple TV-station programming and news broadcasts specifically -- non-stop. Thus, the title: RECORDER. This, Marion Stokes would end up doing for thirty-five years, from 1977-2012, defining what it means to be a television addict slash homebody.
Needless to say, there wasn't much of a social life but then, who needs one when you're basically a self-contained shut-in, like Stokes?
As an ex-librarian, Stokes also loved to read, and her personal library numbered close to fifty thousand books, or so legend has it. My guess is, she was a speed-reader and not much of a duster.
With so many books to peruse and programs to watch, where oh where did Stokes ever find the time for being a mother? We hear from her son, Michael, speak of what it was like growing up with an obsessive-compulsive collector for a mother, a woman opinionated and set in her ways, who fancied herself a media analyst. Melvin, an ex-husband, also chimes in with some comments of his own; these spoken in a strange measured whisper, curiously never explained.
Private, mysterious: Words used by Marion's neighbors and acquaintances of hers to describe the human subject of this slightly above-average documentary.
Meet a woman who lived in her own ivory tower of sorts, with her own chauffeur and manservant, not as a capitalist but as an opulent far-left radical activist, and not simply an armchair one, either.
The TV has been called the boob tube. Yet, for all the television that was watched it's of interest to note that here was at least one viewer whose brain bore little boobage. Call Marion Stokes one of the exceptions to the rule...alongside, but maybe not quite on par with, Noam Chomsky.
I've now seen it and what I can say is this: Ms. Stokes was not your average hoarder. For starters, she was clean and orderly. Moreover, she didn't collect junk but rather items of use and value. Specifically, Marion loved to accumulate practically anything media-related: books, newspapers, videotapes, computers. Keep in mind, all this started for her in the 1970s and '80s, back when the average household had not a single PC or VHS machine in the home.
An eccentric, you say? Case in point: Here was a lady of whom it is said owned a collection of videocassettes totaling 70,000, or thereabouts. That's a seven followed by four zeroes. These were blank tapes used to video-record multiple TV-station programming and news broadcasts specifically -- non-stop. Thus, the title: RECORDER. This, Marion Stokes would end up doing for thirty-five years, from 1977-2012, defining what it means to be a television addict slash homebody.
Needless to say, there wasn't much of a social life but then, who needs one when you're basically a self-contained shut-in, like Stokes?
As an ex-librarian, Stokes also loved to read, and her personal library numbered close to fifty thousand books, or so legend has it. My guess is, she was a speed-reader and not much of a duster.
With so many books to peruse and programs to watch, where oh where did Stokes ever find the time for being a mother? We hear from her son, Michael, speak of what it was like growing up with an obsessive-compulsive collector for a mother, a woman opinionated and set in her ways, who fancied herself a media analyst. Melvin, an ex-husband, also chimes in with some comments of his own; these spoken in a strange measured whisper, curiously never explained.
Private, mysterious: Words used by Marion's neighbors and acquaintances of hers to describe the human subject of this slightly above-average documentary.
Meet a woman who lived in her own ivory tower of sorts, with her own chauffeur and manservant, not as a capitalist but as an opulent far-left radical activist, and not simply an armchair one, either.
The TV has been called the boob tube. Yet, for all the television that was watched it's of interest to note that here was at least one viewer whose brain bore little boobage. Call Marion Stokes one of the exceptions to the rule...alongside, but maybe not quite on par with, Noam Chomsky.