By A. O. SCOTT
 
RECENTLY, American movie audiences have begun to discover Mexico. In 2001, Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Amores Perros" jolted art house patrons with its vivid brutality and stylistic daring, and the following year Alfonso Cuarón's "Y Tu Mamá También," flush with youthful eroticism and crazy formal energy, provided a fresh shock to the jaded cinephile's system. At once challenging and accessible — full of wit, beauty and melodrama as well as novelty and provocation — these were the kind of movies that seemed to open up a new world of possibility. Unprecedented as they may have appeared to North American viewers, they also seemed to gesture backward, toward a rich and thorny history. To watch them was to be seized by a giddy intuition: this is where movies are going. But that excitement was also accompanied by a curiosity based (speaking for myself, at least) on ignorance: movies like this don't just happen. Where did they come from?

During the first three weeks of July (beginning Friday), a partial answer can be found at Film Forum in Manhattan, which is presenting a 26-film retrospective of Mexican movies, from the silent era to the early 90's. Not that this historical survey, which includes Mr. Cuarón's 1991 film "Love in the Time of Hysteria," should be viewed as an exercise in scholarly excavation. While the series, called Cine México, will certainly provide a fine education in the history of Mexican movies, to recommend it on pedagogical grounds would be unfair to the movies themselves, which include rambunctious comedies, politically tinged quasi-westerns, costume epics, abstract art films and plenty of sighing, swooning, black-and-white tear jerkers.

For viewers familiar with North American movie traditions — in particular with Hollywood in the years between the introduction of sound and the rise of television — Mexican cinema may represent both a new world and a parallel universe. The golden age of Mexican filmmaking roughly coincided with that of the Hollywood studios, and there are clear similarities between the products of the two systems. "Ahí está el Detalle" ("That's the Point") is a zany farce about class and marital conflict from 1940 that bears a passing resemblance to Hollywood studio comedies of the same era: a hint of Cukor, a dash of Lubitsch, a liberal sprinkling of Preston Sturges. Melodramas about wronged women and doomed love — Alberto Gout's "Aventurera" (1950) and Emilio Fernández's extraordinary "Mariá Candelaria" (1943), for example — invite their stars (Ninón Sevilla and the luminous Delores Del Rio, respectively) into an international sisterhood of strong-willed sufferers, along with the likes of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman. "Vámonos con Pancho Villa," Fernándo de Fuentes's 1936 epic of the Mexican Revolution, looks a lot like the contemporaneous, pre-Technicolor westerns of Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh and, above all, John Ford.

Fuentes, indeed, is sometimes called the Mexican John Ford, just as Cantinflas, the prolific clown who is the star of "That's the Point," is typically referred to as "The Mexican Chaplin." But these comparisons, while somewhat helpful, also obscure the particular gifts and cultural reference points of the artists in question. Cantinflas's comedy, for one thing, is more verbal than physical; it is as impossible to imagine him in a silent movie as it is to follow his meanderings and obfuscations. His persona also lacks the Little Tramp's sweet innocence: Cantinflas is a classic trickster, a harlequin figure out of the commedia dell'arte tradition willing to lie, cheat and bamboozle anyone in his path, including himself.

In "That's the Point," directed by Juan Bustillo Oro, he finds himself embroiled in the domestic crises of the proper bourgeois household where his girlfriend, Paz, works as the maid. A simple job — Paz asks him to shoot a rabid dog — escalates into a wildly implausible series of misunderstandings that end with Cantinflas on trial for his life. Along the way, a blackmailing gigolo is murdered and seven illegitimate children show up on the doorstep, claiming Cantinflas as their father. The candid incorporation of death and sex into a screwball scenario marks a striking difference between the Mexican and Hollywood golden ages.

There is a frankness in these films that would never have passed muster with the Hays office, a realistic view of human behavior that amounts at times to fatalism. In "Aventurera," for example, the heroine's rapid initial descent into prostitution, while not explicitly spelled out, is hardly euphemized. In short order, a happy middle-class girl discovers her mother's adultery, witnesses her father's subsequent suicide and is fired from one job after another when she refuses to submit to sexual harassment. Delivered into the care of a shady cabaret owner, she is drugged and raped. All of this occupies about 10 minutes of screen time, after which point the main plot of the movie begins and the first of its lavish song-and-dance numbers unfolds.

Mexican movies held onto their connection to music hall, traveling theater and other indigenous forms of popular culture even as Hollywood was burying the memory of vaudeville. But in the 30's and 40's, Mexico was also an increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated society, serving as Latin America's intellectual hub, welcoming European refugees from war and fascism and committed, under president Lázaro Cárdenas and his successors, to noble ideals of democracy and social progress (as well as to the generous funding of movie production.)

In the United States, the New Deal and the studios promoted a kind of optimistic social realism. Something similar flourished in Mexico, but without the optimism. Fuentes's treatment of Mexico's long, ambiguous revolution, which began in 1910 and ended a decade later, is remarkable both for its romanticism and its pessimism. The desert landscape and the Western motifs make you expect a heroic tale of honor and bravery, which "Vámonos con Pancho Villa" both supplies and undoes. The inevitable and proper outcome of any undertaking, it suggests, is death, a specter which confers beauty and meaning on stories as diverse as "That's the Point," "María Candelaria" and, well, "Y Tu Mamá También."

There is perhaps nothing more alien to North American sensibilities than the idea of a popular culture rooted in tragedy, and one of the revelations of Cine México is that an essentially tragic sensibility can contain so much humor, so much variety, so much life. Perhaps no one understood this better than Luis Buñuel, who arrived in Mexico in 1946 and transformed himself, almost overnight, from a Surrealist provocateur into a great filmmaker. The movies he made in Mexico in the 1950's — "Los Olvidados," "Illusion Travels by Streetcar," "Nazarín" and "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz" are the four that will be shown at Film Forum — effortlessly blend neorealist social criticism with an eye for the magic and absurdity of daily life. The exiled filmmaker's adopted country, and especially its capital city, was not so much his subject as his collaborator. His later films never felt as rooted, as authentic as the ones he made in Mexico. Watching them after half a century you can still find yourself thinking: this is where movies are going. It turns out that this is where they have always been.