It’s a long-standing and commonplace belief among movie nerds that the highest level of cinematic purity was lost with the transition from silent film to talkies. Not surprisingly, the argument has rarely been better articulated than it was by François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock during the series of interviews they conducted in 1962, conversations that formed the basis of the book Hitchcock/Truffaut:

Hitchcock: Well, the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. [They did have musical accompaniment, of course.] But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in.

Truffaut: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great filmmakers . . . had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. . . . [O]ne might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.

Hitchcock: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that’s true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call “photographs of people talking.” When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. . . . [W]ith the arrival of sound the motion picture, overnight, assumed a theatrical form. The mobility of the camera doesn’t alter this fact. Even though the camera may move along the sidewalk, it’s still theater. . . . [It] is essential . . . to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you choose to stage the action, your main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention. Summing up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.

When he gave that interview, Hitchcock was in the middle of editing The Birds, which, not incidentally, makes very nice use of sound—caw, caw. But over the next several weeks, if you live in New York or Los Angeles, you will have a wonderful opportunity to see what the two directors were getting at: Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be screening nine of Hitchcock’s own silent movies, which were restored last year by the British Film Institute, complete with new scores.

These aren’t formerly lost movies—though there is a 10th silent Hitchcock, the second film he ever made, that is lost. But until B.F.I. restored them, they were available only as poor, sometimes butchered prints. The three I’ve seen, The Lodger (1926), The Ring (1927), and Blackmail (1929), clean up nicely, especially the latter film, which in some sequences looks nearly as crisp and vivid as if it had been shot last week. What’s more impressive, though, is seeing how fully formed and sophisticated the young Hitchcock was as a filmmaker—already a poet of dread as well as suspense. The formal experimentation, the morbid sense of humor, the visual wit, the fascination with guilt and false accusation, the conflation of violence and sexuality, the fetishistic obsession with blondes (dramatized last year in the film Hitchcock and HBO’s The Girl)—it was all there virtually from the get-go.

The Lodger was Hitchcock’s third film, following The Pleasure Garden (1926), a romantic melodrama about showgirls that is also part of the “Hitchcock 9,” as B.F.I. has branded the films, and The Mountain Eagle (also 1926), another melodrama and “a very bad movie,” according to the director himself. (It’s the one that’s lost, but perhaps that is only a minor tragedy.) The Lodger, on the other hand, was “the first true ‘Hitchcock movie,’” in his own estimation. It opens with a close-up of a fair-haired woman screaming—the latest victim, we soon learn, of a Jack the Ripper–like serial killer who calls himself the Avenger and who, naturally, kills only beautiful young blonde women. (He’d be at home on the current season of The Killing.) Ingrid Bergman was only 11 when the film was made, and Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren weren’t even born, but the mononymic British actress June is an adequate stand-in as the daughter of boarding-house owners who may or may not be harboring the killer, who may or may not be played by the wild-eyed (at least here) 1920s British matinee idol Ivor Novello. In one scene, he lurks menacingly outside the door while June takes a bath, foreshadowing *Psycho’*s shower scene by three and a half decades. The brutal R-rated Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock’s penultimate film, is in some sense a remake of The Lodger—philosophically if not literally.

The Ring involves a romantic triangle: two boxers and one inconstant young wife. Aside from the obvious care, skill, and imagination with which the picture was shot, it’s not particularly Hitchcockian (the girl is a brunette), but it’s fun and the fight scenes are surprisingly visceral. Blackmail also pivots on a fickle heroine. German actress Anny Ondra, playing a shopkeeper’s daughter, ditches her cop boyfriend at a restaurant for a sketchy-looking artist who invites her over to his atelier to see his paintings. Attempted rape ensues; Ondra puts an end to it, and him, with a kitchen knife. She flees the scene, and the next morning the police are baffled as to who the killer is, except for the ditched boyfriend who—twist!—is assigned to the case, finds a key clue, and decides loyally to keep mum. But then a sinister stranger comes a-calling, threatening to reveal the truth unless the couple, not exactly innocent but not exactly guilty, pays up. One of the production’s assistant cameramen, the future director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, Peeping Tom), apparently came up with the idea for the climactic, tour de force chase through the British Museum—the first of the landmark-set finales that would become a Hitchcock trademark in later works such as The Man Who Knew Too Much*, Saboteur,* and North by Northwest.

Blackmail (which was also shot in an inferior sound version, as was sometimes the case in those transitional days) begins with a close-up of a police wagon’s tires—the wheels of justice literally turning. It ends on a note of irony and moral ambiguity that I’m surprised Hitchcock got away with in 1929. (He may have been, too, since he complained to Truffaut about not being able to shoot a somewhat analogous conclusion for The Lodger.) Of course, ambiguity isn’t often allowed in today’s multiplexes either. That’s what we have television for, and I promise that Blackmail had put me in mind of The Sopranos’ series finale even before James Gandolfini died.

If you’re interested enough to have read this far, you should really try to catch at least one of these films. They will have further screenings throughout the country over the summer and fall, but DVD release, I’ve been told, “may be unlikely.