As silent film historian Kevin Brownlow has stated, the fundamentals of "film grammar" - the editing techniques, long shot/closeup shifts, etc. - was firmly in place by the early 1920s. And as many would agree, film technique was reaching some sort of perfection by the late 1920s, just as talkies were coming in and taking over.
I might recommend that you try some of those later silents, for example Wings, Show People, The Wedding March, The Cat and the Canary, and work your way backwards, as it were.
Some DVD's of classic era talkies come with an option of hearing the isolated music an