Peter Bradshaw on why silent movies are worth saving

Martin Scorsese has used a Cannes appearance to announce the creation of a World Cinema Foundation, to protect from extinction the hundreds of silent movies from the early 20th century. By extinction, Scorsese means not merely oblivion and neglect, but physical obliteration: the film stock will crumble into dust or even ignite. Should we care about silent movies?

Isn't it a bit like being forced to marvel at vintage items at a traction engine rally, when we really prefer to zoom around in modern cars? In a sense, it can be, although silent films, preserved on celluloid stock, still look luminously great in a way that TV shows of even 10 or 20 years ago do not. All movie buffs can be persuaded to go into a reverie about their favourite silent films: the magnificence of Buster Keaton's The General, Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, or Fritz Lang's Metropolis, or even the Lumiere Brothers' classic of silent-movie prehistory, The Arrival of a Train at Le Ciotat Station, a single 50-second shot of a train coming in, which was rumoured to terrify early cinemagoers so much they ran for the exit, in fear of being crushed by metal wheels.

And to anyone who thinks that silent movies have no place in the commercial marketplace, I say: Mr Bean. Whatever you think about Rowan Atkinson's quirky creature, he is a silent movie star, who makes real money in real cinemas from Tehran to Tblisi. My own unoriginal favourite is Luis Bu uel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou, with its disturbing images of sliced eyeballs and a clutch of armpit hair instead of a mouth.

It exploits the potential of silent cinema, and cinema in general, like nothing else since. Loving silent movies, real cineastes might say, isn't a matter of archival nostalgia; it's a matter of loving films, here and now. In a sense, all films are silent films.

They are radically different from the text-based worlds of literature and theatre: pure visual spectacle, to which sound is an auxiliary. At any rate, Scorsese thinks his new foundation will create a new audience for silent films. I hope he's right.