Satyajit Ray is a name in world cinema I've been aware of for many years now and I used my lovefilm account to make a conscious effort to see some of his work. The film of his I'd heard of (in the same way you've "heard" of The Seventh Seal even if you've never seen an Ingmar Bergman film) was Aparajito and when I went to rent it it was there as part of the "Apu Trilogy" so I decided it would be worth getting all three and seeing them in order (similar to what I did with Wajda's war trilogy when they showed it on Film Four) - I'm extremely glad I did.
On the first day of shooting Pather Panchali, legend has it, Ray had never directed a scene before, his cameraman had never shot with a film camera before and his non-professional actors had not even been screentested. This movie when watching it is very strange, it starts off uneven, it's not bad but it's not fluid. It gets stymied in inertia and doesn't flow very well (much like this sentence 
). By the finish though it is very smooth and is truly compelling. I found out afterwards it was shot over years and they learnt from their mistakes as they went and you can really tell. An interesting movie about the life of an impoverished family in a Bengali village, but flawed nonetheless in the technique of the storytelling.
By the time they did the sequel, Aparajito, the mysteries of the filming process had revealed themselves to Ray and it's an exceptional film. This continues the story of the family in the city having left their village at the end of the first movie. The direction is wonderful, he uses imagery to tell plot points visually and uses similar shots to emphasise the change in the characters when they're in the same places at different parts of the story. He also uses visual metaphors (like the train on the horizon of where they live, a symbolic reminder of his sister for Apu and also the reminder of Apu coming for his mother), it's fantastically cinematic.
The final installment is The World of Apu and it is very different to Aparajito but it's of the same ridiculously high quality. This is Apu, alone, scraping by in a dishevelled dwelling in the city and what fate deals him when a friend asks Apu to accompany him to his cousin's wedding. Beautifully rhythmic and fluid, stunningly photographed (the high-contrast, at-times amateurish photography of the opening of Pather Panchali is a distant memory) it's a lovely film.
I'm not mentioning actors and actresses in this because the films are not "performances", they're stories about people - this is not to say there aren't first-rate performance (there are) but they are very much intertwined with the films and the way the stories are told, it's all pretty seamless. This is an excellent trilogy which I'd highly recommend, it's not at all like Bollywood movies are now with the song and dance and entertainment (if that's not your thing), these are brutally honest depictions of life and rank up there with the Italian neo-realists, but, eventually, with a flair and smoothness to the style that is an incredibly happy balance for these very special films.