“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” said Gloria Swanson in her famous role as Norma Desmond in 1950’s “Sunset Boulevard.”

That’s a notion that Edward Lorusso of Belgrade embraces. After a career teaching literature to college students, he began an all-consuming hobby in retirement: finding and restoring silent movies.

Most recently, his sleuthing led him to one of the many missing Maine-made films from that time. As a result, director Edgar Jones’ “In the River” will be shown for the first time in a century on Saturday, Oct. 4.

It took a special skill to tell compelling stories with nothing but flickering, black-and-white pictures. A silent film easily crosses the artificial boundaries that language imposes: anyone from anywhere can watch on equal terms.

It’s exciting for anyone with a love of history or just a curiosity about the past to watch something like this;not only does one get to see Maine’s heritage caught on film, but it’s possible to experience what it was like when crowds jammed into those glorious old theaters to watch and listen to the live music that accompanied the action.

“Everybody would go see the films,” Lorusso told me. It’s telling, really, that in the Roaring ‘20s and beyond, Americans watched the same movies, listened to radio shows and hit singles on just a couple of networks and read mass circulation newspapers.

To a degree almost impossible to comprehend today, people were exposed to the same media. They didn’t have the range of choices we take for granted.

For decades, politicians could make references to movies they knew most everyone had seen or radio shows they’d suspect nearly all had heard, or heard of. That broad sense of familiarity has all but vanished.

Even the most popular pieces of entertainment — from “Star Wars” to “The Sopranos” — are as much a mystery to many Americans as, say, Japanese anime is to me.

Without having shared memories, it’s gotten a lot harder for people to have matching ideas, hopes or dreams. We know a whole bunch of stuff, but not the same stuff.

I’m no philosopher, just another ink-stained newspaper guy, so I can’t say whether that’s a good thing. It’s just how it is.

But I know this: if you get a chance on Oct. 4, you should head over to Augusta’s Colonial Theater for the 2 p.m. showing of “In the River,” filmed right here in Maine, which premiered in the same venue back in 1920.

For a couple of hours, you can sink into the past and maybe come away with a new appreciation for what we’ve lost in our headlong rush into the future.

A little more silence and a lot less noise may be what we all need.