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However, questions of faith continued to inform his work. In the collected edition of the screenplays for his `metaphysical' or `chamber' trilogy, Bergman described Through a Glass Darkly (1961) as `certainty achieved', Winter Light (1963) as `certainty unmasked', and The Silence (1963), as `God's silence - the negative impression'. Yet he later stated that the first film was marked `by the idea of the Christian God as something destructive and fantastically dangerous, something filled with risk for the human being and bringing out in him dark destructive forces instead of the opposite'.

Taking its title from a line in St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians and influenced by Chekhov's The Sea Gull - which Bergman was preparing for the Royal Dramatic Theatre as he wrote the screenplay - Through a Glass Darkly was a `surreptitious stage play', as its cinematic aspects mattered less than its intellectual ideas and the emotional interaction of the characters. With its small cast and unity of setting, time and action, it recalled the 1920s German style of Kammerspielfilme that was to influence much of Bergman's 60s output. Moreover, it marked the start of both his association with the Baltic island of Fårö and his long collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who would drastically change Bergman's visual approach.

The narrative centres on Karin (Harriet Andersson), who has recently been released from a psychiatric hospital and is now holidaying on an island with her novelist father David (Gunnar Björnstrand), her brother Minus (Lars Passgård) and her husband, Martin (Max von Sydow). During the course of a day, Karin suffers from hallucinations, has incestuous sex with Minus in the hull of a scuttled ship, and discovers that her father has been making notes on her schizophrenic condition with a view to turning them into fiction. Retreating to the attic, Karin becomes convinced that God is a giant spider intent on snaring her in his web and she detaches utterly from reality and is helicoptered away. The trauma convinces David that love not only proves God's existence, but that `love is itself God', while Minus is touched that his usually distant father has shared this confidence with him.

There were no such certainties in Winter Light, however.

Inspired by a conversation with a clergyman and Bergman's tour of Uppland churches with his father, it was filmed as a Passion Play, with the action taking place between midday and 3pm on a chilly Sunday afternoon. But everyone suffers, not just widowed Lutheran pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand), who is unable either to prevent troubled parishioner Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow) from committing suicide or to accept the affection of his former mistress, Märta Lundberg (Ingrid Thulin), a kind-hearted, eczema-suffering teacher who never quite managed to take the place of his beloved wife. Yet, even in the depths of his despair, Tomas still enters his empty chapel to conduct vespers in the hope that the familiar ritual will prove that God has not forsaken him.

When Bergman first showed the picture to Käbi Lareti, she responded, `Yes, Ingmar, it's a masterpiece; but it's a dreary masterpiece.'

It's certainly an austere film. But it's also a courageous one, as Sven Nykvist used the wintry lighting of the churches and the frozen landscape to reinforce the cold comfort being offered to Tomas and his flock by their fading faith. Moreover, Ingrid Thulin's delivery of Märta's letter in an unflinching close-up was equally uncompromising and set the trend for Bergman using speeches to camera instead of mirror images to reveal his characters' innermost thoughts.

Gunnar Björnstrand's performance was even more remarkable, however, as his health had collapsed shortly after arriving from the set of The Pleasure Garden - which Bergman and Erland Josephson had scripted under the pseudonym Buntel Eriksson for director Alf Kjellin, in order to see Svensk Filmindustri through a production crisis that had been caused by the sudden demise of Carl Anders Dymling. Tomas's haggard countenance, therefore, owed as much to Björnstrand's brush with death as to his talent. But his dauntless playing against type nevertheless merits comparison with Claude Leydu's harrowing display in Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950).

Bergman had produced Winter Light as a regretful riposte to his assertion at the end of Through a Glass Darkly that `God is love and love is God'. However, he still felt the need to expose the hopelessness of Tomas's search for solace and solutions and he succeeded in The Silence, which depicted the modern world as a godless wilderness in which love and communication have been replaced by sex and repression.

Ester (Ingrid Thulin) is travelling through an unnamed country with her sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and her 10 year-old nephew, Johan (Jörgen Lindström). Even though they cannot speak the local language and disconcerted by the tanks that pass by their train, they have no option but to book into a hotel in the city of Timoka when the consumptive Ester falls ill.

While Johan explores the labyrinthine corridors, the impatient Anna goes to a theatre to escape the tedium of their room. She arranges to have joyless sex with a bartender (Birger Malmsten), after she sees a couple copulating in the darkness, and Johan (whom Anna has encouraged to harbour Oedipal feelings) later sees them together before being dressed in women's clothing by a troupe of dwarfs, who are the hotel's only other guests. Meanwhile, Ester, who detests men, fantasises about her sister as she masturbates and laments the distance that has grown between them since the death of their father.

Eventually, Anna gets so frustrated by Ester's condition that she abandons her to her fate and the sympathy of a kindly waiter (Håkan Jahnberg). But all is not as bleak as it seems, as Ester has given Johan a list of translations to aid their passage, and the final close-up of the boy mouthing the words `spirit', `anxiety' and `joy' suggest that he will one day be able to re-connect with the wider world.

With its oppressive sense of latent menace, The Silence is one of Bergman's bleakest visions of humanity. The characters seem suspended in a waking dream that reflected the wider cultural disillusion with the Cold War world that found contemporaneous echo in the works of Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. But this new subjectivity and fascination with matters metaphysical would not have seemed so onerous without the intensity of Thulin and Lindblom's performances and the stifling aura of entrapment generated by Sven Nykvist's photography and P.A. Lundgren's forbidding sets.

The public was largely drawn to the film by the furore that arose over its frank approach to sex. But, despite Bergman's complaint that the picture had attracted `a lot of unwanted viewers', it proved that he could live with the iconoclasts of the nouvelle vague, whose challenging self-reflexivity he would incorporate into The Silence's companion piece, Persona. Satyajit Ray was Bergman's contemporary and owed a similar debt in his early career to Italian neo-realism. However, while Bergman matured as a film-maker, the popular conception is that Ray failed to improve upon the Apu trilogy that made his name. Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959) are all exceptional pictures. But the nine titles contained in Artificial Eye's three-part Satyajit Ray Collection prove conclusively that Bengal's master craftsman continued to produce challenging and enduring work up to his death in 1992.

Ray won consecutive Best Director prizes at Berlin for Mahanagar/The Big City (1963) and Charulata/The Lonely Wife (1964). The former was his first film with a contemporary setting and it exposed the fault lines in Kolkattan society, as it sought to come to terms with both the legacy of the imperial past and shifting gender roles. Humiliated by losing his status as family breadwinner to his wife, bank clerk Anil Chatterjee exudes a chauvinist pride that contrasts tellingly with Madhabi Mukherjee's growing confidence as both a sales rep and a woman. But there is a satirical sting in a tale whose happy ending holds no guarantees for the future.

Based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore and clearly revealing the influence of Jean Renoir, Charulata was Ray's favourite of his own films. Set during the 19th-century Bengal Renaissance, it features another outstanding performance by Madhabi Mukherjee, as the bored wife of newspaper editor, Sailen Mukherjee. However, he comes to regret his decision to invite literary cousin Soumitra Chatterjee to live with them, as not only does Madhabi develop feelings for her guest, but he also encourages her to think for herself. Moreover, the publication of her first story coincides with the collapse of her husband's business after he is swindled by brother Syamal Ghosal.

Exquisitely designed by Bansi Chandragupta and boasting a delicate score by Ray himself, this gently ironic drama is full of superbly staged set-pieces. Prime among them are the opening revealing the extent of Madhabi's isolation and the swing sequence, in which she finally surrenders to her feelings for Chatterjee. But, for all the fluidity of Subrata Mitra's camerawork, it's the freeze-frame that climaxes the couple's poignant reunion that makes the deepest impression.

Another emancipated woman exposes a vainglorious man's feet of clay in Nayak/The Hero (1966), as chic magazine journalist Sharmila Tagore catches movie star Uttam Kumar on a bad day, as he travels by train to Delhi to accept a prestigious award, just as his latest film is being panned by the critics and his personal life is being splashed across the front page. However, rather than reveal his guilty outpourings about snubbing fading actor Bireswar Sen and seducing the scheming, but married Sumita Sanyal, Tagore recognises the loneliness and pain beneath the greasepaint and bravura and spikes the scoop.

Making extensive use of flashbacks and reveries, Ray cannily explores the psychology of both stars and fans. But, while it entertains in a Bollywood kind of way, this isn't one of his more perceptive pictures. The passengers are essentially bourgeois caricatures, while the superficial insights into the clash between tradition and modernity and the battle of the sexes betray the fact that this was only Ray's second original screenplay.

The second triptych comprises three of Ray's lesser-known features: Kapurush/The Coward; Mahapurush/The Holy Man (both 1965) and Joi Baba Felunath/The Elephant God (1978).

Kapurush harks back to the self-sacrificial aspects of Mahanagar and Charulata, while also anticipating Nayak's exposure of male weakness. It centres on scriptwriter Soumitra Chatterjee, who is forced to accept the hospitality of tea planter Haradhan Bannerjee when his car breaks down. However, on entering his host's home, Chatterjee realises that his wife is Madhabi Mukherjee, whose love he was too timid to embrace as a student, when she risked alienating her family in order to marry him.

Again, very much a miniature, this laudably restrained melodrama originally formed part of a double bill with Mahapurush, a wry treatise on religious charlatanism that ranks among Ray's most enjoyable outings. Widower Prasad Mukherjee is so impressed with holy man Charuprakash Ghosh during a train journey that he invites him into his home and seeks his advice in finding a suitor for daughter, Gitali Roy. Realising she can exploit the situation to provoke Satindra Bhattacharya into declaring his affection, Roy pretends to be convinced by Ghosh's tall tales about being ageless and a close confidante of Plato, Christ, Buddha, Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein. And her ruse seems set to work, as Bhattacharya and his friends vow to expose Ghosh as a fraud.

The credulity of disciples is further examined in Joi Baba Felunath, the second film to feature detective Prodosh Mitra after The Golden Fortress (1974) - which, frustratingly, is not included in this series.

Working from his own novel and returning to the scene of Aparajito, Ray concocts an engaging mystery in the holy city of Benares, as pilgrims come from far and wide to sit at the feet of swami Monu Mukherjee. However, no sooner has sleuth Soumitra Chatterjee arrived for a vacation with cousin Siddharta Chatterjee and whodunit writer Santosh Dutta than he is called upon to investigate the theft of a golden statue of the elephant god, Ganesha, the day after Haradhan Bannerjee refused to sell the priceless heirloom to shady businessman Utpal Dutt. It seems an open and shut case. But, by employing his unique blend of Indian mysticism and Holmesian logic and by playing on the superhero fantasies of a young witness, Chatterjee not only uncovers the culprit, but also exposes a duplicitous operation at a supposedly sacred shrine.

Ray was often accused of ignoring political issues, but the final selection demonstrates conclusively otherwise.

Although it was made for television, the Hindi featurette The Deliverance (1981) is one of Ray's most devastating films. Following Brahmin Mohan Agashe's shameful treatment of untouchable Om Puri, it is a bold denunciation of India's caste system and the starkness of Soumendhu Roy's photography reinforces the seething despair that underlies the action.

Adapted from a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World (1984) is equally contentious, as it questions the motives of Soumitra Chatterjee, a leader of the swadeshi boycott against foreign-made goods that was launched in the wake of the British decision to partition Bengal in 1905. Like Charulata (1964), this is also a treatise on the status of women, as landlord Victor Banerjee's sheltered wife Swatilekha Chatterjee comes to understand the cynical realities of a divided society by recognising the duplicity of her feted guest.

And the reckless intransigence of the bourgeoisie is further indicted in An Enemy of the People (1989), a Bengali reworking of the play by Henrik Ibsen that Ray shot on studio sets, rather than his usual locations, as he recovered from a heart attack. A study in vested interest and the arrogance of power, it is dominated by a dignified display of dutiful determination by Soumitra Chatterjee, as the doctor risking his reputation to secure the closure of a temple with a contaminated water supply.