Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968

摘要

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 1004, 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.