Jean-Luc Godard has credited much of the impetus of the French New Wave to the fact that the young filmmakers who created the movement had spent so much time watching silent movies, courtesy of Henri Langlois, the great film collector and founder of the Cinematheque Francaise.
Godard believed that the radically alien aesthetic of silent movies allowed these young filmmakers to see the medium with fresh eyes, freed from the expectations of current style enforced by the habits and dictates of the French national film industry and the Hollywood studio system.
Godard also said that the principal idea of the New Wave was to get everybody out of filmmaking who didn't belong in filmmaking -- to wrest control of the medium from corporate functionaries and state bureaucrats and return it to those who actually created movies.
Today, when corporate control of popular movies is nearly absolute, and forcing its range of possibility into narrower and narrower limits, a study of silent cinema is even more likely to inspire the sort of resistance that will be required to rescue movies from corporate perversion and reclaim them for humane expression on behalf of the culture at large.
D. W. Griffith once said, paraphrasing Joseph Conrad, "What I'm trying to do after all is make you see."
Look.