By Dennis Harvey

CHURCH AND STATE ought to be strange bedfellows, but the truth is, they're getting it on all the time. Mexico's history since its conquest by Cortés has ensured a particularly high degree of this phenomenon, as four centuries of Spanish rule, 70 years of single-party PRI dominance, and various periods of chaos and dictatorship between have made faith a convenient tool for manipulation as well as a survival tactic.

When in pain, one wants relief more than explanations or even promises of gradual improvement. Thus "the opiate of the masses" – not to say religion is inherently a bad thing (my opinion, not Marx's), except when applied as a diversion tactic – becomes ever more potent, addictive, and hallucinatory in situations of long-term injustice or hardship. Simultaneously, the resentment of liberals and intellectuals toward that vast blind alley tends to produce statements that are ambivalent when not downright blasphemous.

These tensions have been expressed many ways in both the commercial and artier avenues of Mexican cinema. Slow to develop at first, the industry became a major force in Latin America by the late '40s, pumping out glossy comedies, musicals, rancheras (roughly equivalent to westerns), and lurid cabaretera musical potboilers. As in most devout nations with a healthy secular life – even today, Mexico's population is about 90 percent Catholic – entertainment was often morally instructive in a hubba-hubba way, giving you lots of sin for your buck before the last reel's deus ex machina retribution. These glossy escapisms dwindled, however, as Hollywood imports, declining government support, and a new emphasis on lovably cheap and cheesy exploitation flicks sapped the industry's stature.

Social critiques tentatively advanced in Mexican cinema's golden age (most notably by prestige director Emilio Fernandez and 15-year Spanish émigré Luis Buñuel) became much more explicit from the late '60s onward, as those "turbulent" times heightened activist (and artistic) filmmaking everywhere. That shift coincided with rising political discontent and the beginning of the PRI's long fall, triggered in part by the murder of hundreds of student protesters in 1968 in Tlatelolco.

Which is just about where we pick up the Pacific Film Archive's Cine Mexico series, a four-week, more-or-less-chronological retrospective that's already put in its time with Cantinflas, Tin Tan, Dolores del Rio, suffering rumba dancers, and Buñuel's antipapal surrealisms. Skipping the '60s entirely, its second half commences with a double dose of innocents slaughtered – by "good" God-fearing people whose angst has been fanned into a hellfire the devil himself might approve of.

The most graphic illustration of turning a congregation into an angry mob is Felipe Cazals's Canoa (Dec. 2, 5:30 p.m.), released just seven years after the incident it reenacts in chillingly credible docudrama fashion. Shortly before the Tlatelolco slaughter, with paranoia high as state-controlled media paint student uprisings as anarchistic thuggery, five young low-level employees at the University of Puebla joy-trip to hike up a mountain.

Arriving by bus in the small burg of San Miguel Canoa, they're puzzled by the population's general hostility and in particular by the local priest's refusal to grant shelter when a harsh storm prevents their immediate trekking further.

What they don't know is that the priest (Enrique Lucero), "exiled" here after shady doings higher up the ecclesiastical scale, has used intimidation and fear to control nearly every aspect of town life: politics, police, electricity, road and water access, and more are his to control, and to withhold when proper monetary "respect" isn't paid. The citizenry is mostly too poor and uneducated to do more than mutter discontent under its breath. But still the priest worries – fearing his career death may come from above (there have been complaints to the government, even to the pope), he whips the peasants below into ever greater frenzies of xenophobic hate toward Communists, atheists, and other "enemies of God" who are purportedly invading any day now.

Within hours of the collegiate visitors' arrival, rumor-tindered panic set aflame by both pulpit and public loudspeaker has them branded as "Communist banditos" out to "steal our religion." Forgetting for the moment that thou shalt not kill, machete-bearing townspeople corner the bewildered lads, literally tearing them limb from limb in their fury. The movie reveals straight away that five died (including a local; one outsider barely survived). But actually seeing the bloodbath's preparation and grisly details acted out lends it harrowing intensity nonetheless.

Canoa's 7:45 p.m. co-feature, The Change (1971), is a similar if fictive construct sacrificing youth to the corrupt status quo. Tired of Mexico City life's indignities, two late-20s hipsters with sideburns long and flares extrawide (Hector Bonilla, Sergio Jiminez) decide to "live off the land," arriving at a Veracruz beach. But they discover that the simple life is no longer possible – the nation's drive toward industrial production and pollution has extended even to this remote spot. Pushed toward a prankish gesture of protest, our heroes get a response far harsher than our own humorless former mayor Willie Brown's was to his custard comeuppance. Local police, the mayor, and the company man are the self-appointed gods here and aren't merciful ones.

A grotesque element has often been present in the most adventuresome Mexican cinema, extending from Buñuel to Argentine-born transplant Alejandro Jodorowsky (El topo) and his protégé, Juan Lopez Moctezuma (of 1978's Exorcist-on-LSD Alucarda), on through Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores perros and Hollywood-adopted Guillermo del Toro's fantasies (Hellboy). A hyperreal, ritualistic feel permeates many of their efforts, turning the screen into an altar for visual iconography both sacred and profane. In the PFA series, Arturo Ripstein's three-hour exercise in masochistic Wagnerian agony, The Beginning and the Dead (Dec. 10, 7:30 p.m.), and Jorge Fons's Midaq Alley (Dec. 3, 8:45 p.m.) are jet-black morality plays in which salvation is a grinning death's head. Both were adapted from works by Egypt's Nobel winner Naguib Mahfouz, but his sensibility adapts so easily to a Mexican milieu that you'd never guess.

At once the starkest and most baroque view here of redemption's false hope amid a suffering world is that presented in Dana Rotberg's 1991 Angel of Fire (Dec. 5, 7:40 p.m.), a writ-smaller version of Jodorowsky's Santa sangre that packs more blood per prayer bead. Its heroine is Alma, a prematurely voluptuous adolescent fire eater who shares her father's circus life – and bed – with a happiness and innocence that's oblivious to all notions of sin.

When he dies, however, and she's discovered to be pregnant, Alma leaves the tattered big top. An evangelical puppet theater (Evangelina Sosa) attracts her with its mix of familiar spectacle and promised salvation. She's reluctantly taken in by the imposing Redemptress, a.k.a. Malena (Gina Moret), who assigns penances that grow more severe as she becomes aware of the dawning sexual attraction of "pure-born" son Sacramento (Roberto Sosa) to the newcomer.

Alma's revelation of hypocrisy in the religious "wisdom" she'd trusted brings on a mini-apocalypse – an avenging angel's parting gift to forgiving believers. Shot on a shoestring, Angel of Fire has the power of folk art iconography as well as its frequent fatalism. Repression is horror (Sacramento punishes his lustful thoughts with a cactus hair shirt), pleasure inseparable from self-loathing. The film's perverse air is further heightened when you know that its tortured young lovers are played by offscreen siblings.

Other titles remaining in Cine Mexico include two notable 1990 fantasias of indigenous pre-conquest spirituality. Nicolas Echevarria's Cabeza de Vaca (Dec. 12, 4:30 p.m.) is a trippy Herzog-like fiction imagining the shipwrecked titular Spaniard's immersion in soon-to-be-destroyed Indian mystical rites. Juan Mora Catlett's even more surreal Return to Aztlan (Dec. 12, 6:40 p.m.) tips its hat to Jodorowsky and Sergey Parajanov as it brings a primary Aztec legend to visually striking life.

Few of these were very commercial films, at home or abroad. But the fascination with sin, organized religion, and institutional corruption is no rarefied taste in Mexico: just two years ago the country's greatest homegrown film hit ever, The Crime of Father Amaro, centered on an ambitious young priest (the now omnipresent Gael García Bernal) who left no commandment unbroken – including murder – in his climb up to most un-heavenly rewards. It's a blunt lesson we gringos might well absorb, given the current climate. Whenever powerful men (or women) turn holy ventriloquist, God's word can get warped in translation. 'Cine Mexico' runs through Dec. 12. PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 652-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.