The World Through His Eyes : If you’ve seen them, Satyajit Ray’s serene, shattering masterworks from India changed your life. If you’ve never experienced them, now’s your chance.

Satyajit Ray, who died at the age of 70 in 1992, was perhaps the most complexly sensual and transcendent film artist who ever lived. He made more than 30 features, as well as several shorts and documentaries, in a career that began in India in 1955 with “Pather Panchali”--the first movie in his famous “Apu Trilogy,” one of the most acclaimed film works of all time. There are so many masterpieces in Ray’s filmography (at least 10 by my count) that his output is more than astonishing--it’s almost superhuman.

And yet Ray was a supremely human artist. No other filmmaker so enhanced for us the glow of pure shared feeling. The greatness of his movies lies in the poetry of life revealed so fully that it takes on a timelessness. He operates right at the radiant core of experience, with its supernal stillnesses and sorrows.

Beginning Friday, the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex will host an extensive retrospective of many of Ray’s finest films in beautifully restored, pearly toned 35-millimeter prints. In addition to “The Apu Trilogy,” which also includes “Aparajito” and “The World of Apu,” such masterworks as “Two Daughters,” “Charulata,” “Devi” and “The Music Room” will be screened, as well as the lesser--that is to say, the merely wonderful--films “The Big City” and “The Middleman.” (If the festival had included “Distant Thunder,” “Days and Nights in the Forest” and “The Home and the World” we’d have just about all the greatest Rays released in the West.)

The series, distributed through Sony Pictures Classics, comes about through the ministrations of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, who knew and revered Ray. (Also a composer, he wrote the music for several of their early Indian movies.) They deserve our everlasting gratitude for rescuing these movies from the near oblivion of film school classrooms and history texts.

And these are the famous Ray films. The sad fact is that, beginning in the mid-’60s, Ray’s movies often went virtually undistributed in this country--there are at least a dozen, including two of his final three, that have never been picked up for theatrical release. (His last film, “The Stranger,” is finally scheduled for an early May playdate in New York. An L.A. engagement should follow.)

For film-literate audiences, the lack of ready access to Ray’s films over the years--except, in some cases, on video, where their visual beauties are squelched--is a tragedy equal to any Ray ever put on the screen. We often talk in this country now about the function of art in society, what it can do for you, who should subsidize it. Art is debated as some kind of political outreach program. But Ray’s greatest films bring us back to what art really is all about. They’re shattering, haunting experiences. They are art in the most unalterable ways--they leave you forever changed.

Ray’s movies have the force of personal experience because they involve us so completely. He draws serenely on all his senses and he asks, gently, that we draw on all of ours. His communion with us is like a blessing conferred. There are many “ideas” in Ray’s films but, for him, ideas are inseparable from the sensuousness with which they are expressed. When we see the lonely, neglected upper-class wife Charu in “Charulata” swinging high up into the clouds, her rapturous momentary burst of freedom is like an extended swoon. We breathe in the clouds right along with her. (This sequence recalls a similar passage in Jean Renoir’s “A Day in the Country”--Renoir was Ray’s mentor and kindred spirit.)

In “The Big City,” an impoverished professor is fitted for eyeglasses by a former pupil, and, out of the darkness of the eye exam, which he knows he cannot afford, the man’s face emerges glistening with tears like little diadems.

The final harrowing image in “The Postmaster,” which is the first of two self-contained stories in “Two Daughters,” is a child’s long, silent walk past the man who unthinkingly destroyed her. Her silence destroys him, too. (At 56 minutes, “The Postmaster” is, I think, the greatest short feature ever made.)

In “Pather Panchali,” set in the 1920s in a poor ancestral village in Bengal, little Apu and his sister Durga have been fighting, but then she races ahead of him into fields of waving tall grass and far beyond they come upon a huge locomotive crossing the plains. They have always wanted to come this far and see this train, and the image rises up out of the shimmer like a fever dream. In “Aparajito,” Apu is a scholarship student in Calcutta, and his desperately ill mother, who has been crowded out of her beloved son’s life, rises out of bed because she thinks she hears her son’s voice. She thinks he has returned, and she goes outside into the darkness and sees only a vast sparkling of fireflies. They are like a benediction. It is the last time we see her.

In “The World of Apu,” after much sorrow, Apu takes a bride, Sharmila Tagore’s Aparna, whose storybook beauty brings out the deep joy in his ruined orphan’s face. We can see shining through his features the look of the little boy Apu. (It’s like a double image.) And when, after more sorrow, Apu--played supremely well as an adult by Ray’s most oft-used actor,Soumitra Chatterjee--is brought together for the first time with his 5-year-old son Kajal, we can see how their faces match up. The story has come full circle--we feel like we’ve been through a life. The final image of Apu with his son on his shoulders--with duplicate ecstatic smiles--is almost unbearably moving because we know the fires they have come through.

For those who haven’t experienced his movies, Ray is often mistaken for some kind of ethnographic realist. He wrote in his 1976 essay collection “Our Films Their Films,” recently published in this country, that “for a popular medium the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and have its roots in it.” But for Ray, who was born into a prominent Bengali family far removed from the world of Apu, life is embraced in ways that dwarf any notions of documentary “realism.”

What Ray was after was not realism but an authentic idiom: He wanted to rescue Indian movies from the corrupt escapist traditions of musical spectaculars and chattery high-flown costume dramas that neglected the actual lives--including the fantasy lives--of the Indian people. Though the Indian film industry was gargantuan and had existed since the silent era, Ray was India’s first film artist, and he drew on everything the other Indian movies didn’t--on the stories and novels of Rabindranath Tagore and other cherished writers, on children’s fables, on his own books and stories for children. (Ray edited and illustrated a popular children’s magazine, which his grandfather had started, for more than 20 years. His father was Bengali’s most famous writer of nonsense verse and children’s books.) He used composers like Ravi Shankar and he took his camera crews into the villages and cities of Bengal to get at the way people’s lives really looked and sounded.

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Ray did not seek to demystify life. He wanted to expand life’s mysteriousness using the most direct and distilled of means. In his movies, the beauties of the explicable and the inexplicable are joined. This is why we so often find ourselves deeply moved by a gesture, an image, without really knowing why. Not knowing why is part of the beauty. (Even his most despairing passages are strangely exhilarating because of the force of perception behind them.)

Ray’s special feeling for children is bound up in the way he sees the world. In a sense, all his movies are fables seen through a child’s eyes: They have the enraptured freshness of things viewed as if for the first time. The tragedies and the joys are experienced as a child might apprehend them--as great, withering finalities, like something out of a fairy tale.

And yet the past is forever present in Ray’s films. Nothing is truly final. In the luminous atmosphere of his movies is a beckoning to lamps lit long ago. His people, particularly his women with their flowing saris and ceremonial face markings, partake of the ancient. Looking at them is like looking through time. Ray saw women as wholly spiritual--again, as an enraptured child might--and his best films were incitements against the ways in which their spirits were constrained. (Ray countered both orthodox Hinduism and Victorianism.)

But ultimately Ray saw everything as wholly spiritual. His sympathies were for all people; no aspect of their existence was tangential. He was a true pantheist--even the squirrels and monkeys in his movies seem lit from within. There is nothing sentimental about any of this. It goes to something deeper: Ray saw the sacredness in everything he photographed. No film artist ever gave us more eloquent close-ups of his characters, or deeper psychological soundings, but the essential mystery behind those faces remains. It is the mystery of who we are.

The sounds and images in his movies are emblems of his vast ongoing world: The howl of jackals; the beggar’s drone; the whisperings of fireflies; the shaded fearful glance of a girl who believes she might be a goddess; a young, hesitant city woman putting on lipstick for the first time; an old woman reciting a story to small children, with her sharp jagged shadow rising and falling behind her. Finally all these moments seem parts of the same great voluptuous movie. They add up to a kind of incantation. The spell celebrates the anguished, ecstatic immanence of life.

* The Satyajit Ray series begins Friday at Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica. For schedule information: (310) 394-9744; for group sales, (310) 478-1041.