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.