While I do think a talkie is better at one long story with a only one or several main characters, a silent film can be better and richer and deeper for a series of vignettes. Say about World War I:
a soldier who makes it back from the war,
a soldier who doesn't,
someone from a Quaker family,
a girl worried about her older brother,
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'
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So, an hour and 40 minute silent film might have a series of ten or eleven different stories. When one ends, there's a couple of second pause when you can let your concentration slump, and then large words on the screen "Heinz Kohl is a thirty-five year-old doctor who worked in a field hospital in France" introduce the next. And after that, there is another vignette which humanizes an older French general.
And you walk out of that theater, Wow, so many ideas and experiences and thoughts. And you have the experience, Oh, yeah, yeah, there was that one, which you had almost forgotten.