The cover of this detailed and engaging study includes a photo, taken by the author in 2009, of billboard posters announcing the candidacy of the film-maker Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas for congressional election. ‘Pino se planta’ is the caption, against an eco-friendly green background, alongside a photo of Solanas and the emblem of his party, Proyecto Sur (a party first announced in fictional form in his 1988 film Sur). ‘Pino’ Solanas is a hardy perennial who traverses this historical account of Argentine film-making, which defines its boundaries as being between 1968 and 2004, though it both stretches further back in time and hints at a complex future. As I write this review, in late April 2014, Solanas is one of the presidential candidates for the broad centre-left alliance, Frente Amplio UNEN, that will compete in the next election. He remains a firm nationalist, but his 1960s belief in Peronism has been tempered and is scarcely mentioned in his current campaign, with environmental issues such as mining, fracking and water pollution taking precedence. To trace the trajectory of film-making and the Argentine Left over a 40-year period is a very complex task, requiring both a detailed understanding of tensions and differences within this broad term, ‘the Left’, and also powers of synthesis to avoid collapsing the study into a taxonomy of titles and dates. Dr Stites Mor manages this task extremely well.

From the notes and bibliography, it is clear that Dr Stites Mor has spent a number of years researching in Argentina. This offers her an ‘insider's view’ that is evident on every page, as she deploys a range of primary resources, including difficult-to-trace documentaries, interviews with protagonists of the era, film and political journals and industrial archives. Her main argument focuses on expanding the term ‘transition’ cinema, which is normally used in literature on Argentine cinema to describe the decade of the 1980s, from the first manifestations of cultural opposition to the dictatorship in journals such as Cine Boletín and Punto de Vista to the collapse of the dictatorship and the democratic ‘return’ under the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín, who saw the promotion of Argentine film at home and abroad as a key element of his political and cultural platform. Dr Stites Mor argues that this time frame is too narrow to enable us fully to understand the complexities of the period. Instead she structures the book around three generations of film-makers: those that developed their work in the imaginative proximity of social revolution, from 1968; a second generation (sometimes the same film-makers, but with their ideas modified by the crushing defeat of the revolutionary project after 1974, and particularly after 1976, with the advent of the brutal military regime) whose work appeared in the 1980s; and a third generation of documentary film-makers that emerged in the Menem presidential period from 1989 and commented on the vicissitudes and ideological somersaults of the Menem regime as well as the financial crash of the late 1990s and early 2000s and its aftermath. Her introduction melds these periods effectively by offering the example of two young directors, Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina, who screened their first feature, Raymundo (based on the 1960s/1970s radical film-maker Raymundo Gleyzer), at a factory takeover in May 2003 – a radical film ‘intervention’ very much in the style of the late 1960s, but adapted to a new context of crisis. The book is divided into three sections, in accordance with its temporal frame. Each period is explored in two chapters, focusing both on broader trends and on particular film-makers and film cooperatives (Raymundo Gleyzer in part I, Solanas in part II, and independent film-makers such as Andrés Di Tella in part III).

Film criticism on Argentina has covered the period under analysis in broad brushstrokes and has pointed, in line with Dr Stites Mor's argument, to continuities and breaks with the past. But this criticism has largely concentrated on fiction film, with particular emphasis on the ‘new’ Argentine cinema that has emerged since the late 1990s. What makes Transition Cinema of particular interest is not just its attention to the often neglected field of documentary (with the occasional reference to fictional film, as in the case of Solanas' 1980s features, Tangos and Sur), but also the complexity and nuance of the arguments, the telling detail, and the exhaustive exploration of cultural forms, groups and institutions and their relations to changing political developments, primarily between 1968 and 2004 but also stretching back to the cultural policies of the first Peronist regimes between 1946 and 1955 and reaching forward to the first years of the Kirchner regimes. All the sections work well, but chapters 5 and 6 are particularly rich in their presentation and analyses of new documentary film directors and movements in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In a work that synthesises so much information in such an elegant form, there is, perhaps inevitably, little space for textual analysis, though such analysis, when offered, is incisive. Closer textual analysis of a number of representative films – perhaps a future project for Dr Stites Mor – would allow more space to comment on both innovative and traditional aesthetic forms, the deployment of new technologies, and ideological content. The work of Solanas, for example, has been the subject of much critical debate centred on his radical aesthetic forms and his less nuanced political messages. Throughout her book, Dr Stites Mor is theoretically well informed, and she wears this theory lightly, as an aide to her overall design, not as an exercise in meta-textual theory.

Pino for president in 2015? The road that leads from his radical La hora de los hornos of 1968 to this possible new incarnation – which illustrates in microcosm the changes in the cultural and political fields over the intervening period – is well mapped by Dr Stites Mor, with all its potholes, one-way streets, roadblocks, twists and turns.