FROM the days of Thomas Edison, the New York area has been a big part of the film industry, and now modern technology is turning some of the strip malls and storage sheds of New Jersey and New York into silent-movie shrines. With help from the Web, fans of those films can hike along parking lots, weedy streambeds and gritty alleys where early screen actors posed as American Indians, Confederate soldiers, Soviet spies, Dickens characters and escaped convicts.

This summer, expert local historians and preservationists drove me around to look at a few that appear in recently rediscovered film clips. Now I can actually picture Theda Bara beguiling suitors on rock outcroppings in Fort Lee, N.J., or Lionel Barrymore’s being followed by star-struck extras on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y., or D. W. Griffith using hand-forged iron gadgets to produce fade-outs while filming along an eroded canal towpath in Cuddebackville, N.Y., in Orange County.

“It’s like hallowed ground,” Ben Model, a silent-film historian and piano accompanist for films, told me, referring to the Cuddebackville blacksmith workshops where Griffith commissioned his newfangled closeable tubes.

Forgotten movie artifacts keep turning up in these towns, museum displays are expanding, and silent films made locally are playing at festivals while townspeople try to pinpoint which real sites are flickering in the backgrounds.