Silent film is by no means one of my preferred types of cinema, and a slight prejudice against it has led to the Catch 22 situation of avoiding it and thereby magnifying my totally unfounded stereotypical expectations. I avoid it because I half expect to have to make allowances for over-theatricality, self-consciousness, and potential stodginess, not to mention the fear that any pleasure I find in it might come from a lovable old fashioned quaintness, rather than true merit. So in an attempt to give silent films some seriously overdue attention, I took myself off to Leicester to taste a day of the Thirteenth British Film Festival - this year entitled: The World Before You : Exploration, Science and Nature in British Silent Film.

This year's title betokens a varied selection of films involving in some way exploration and travel, ranging from the realms of Everest, Antarctica, and the sea to the Lost World of Conan Doyle. Rare archive documentary and in-their-day blockbuster features mingle with presentations on scholarly work in progress in restoration and recovery. All films have live accompaniments on piano or a selection of other instruments by some of the world's leading silent film musicians, in itself a feast of tremendous talent.

The first film of the day was SHE (as in ... Who Must Be Obeyed) , a sumptuous 1925 version of the H Rider Haggard novel (a bestseller in its day), directed by Leander de Cordova. A handsome young Englishman sets off into darkest Africa to discover the truth about his ancestry, along with sobersides guardian Professor Holly (notable German actor Heinrich George) and his bumbling servant to provide the knockabout humour, and there finds a kingdom ruled by a beautiful white sorceress (Betty Blythe, lissom, but not always quite as menacing as one would wish), who has been waiting for him through the ages. Imbued with all the imperialistic fascination with the exotic dark continent of its time, it foreshadows so many tales of dangerously exotic, vampish women wearing very little (and at one point Betty seem to bare her all, albeit contained in a pillar of fire) which were to provide a staple male fantasy for years to come. Entertainingly droll and self-consciously poetic as the journey draws to its end, it's for the most part good natured if xenophobic hokum of its time, and a reminder of how very unsexy a man can look in a droopy loincloth and Egyptian headgear.

Quite another kettle of fish was the second feature of the day, Sam's Boy (1922), directed by Manning Haynes. As one might guess by his thespian-esque moniker, Haynes was originally an actor, who turned to directing in 1921, and this adaptation of a WW Jacobs story was his fourth film of a prolific 28 between 1921 and 1938. It's a delightful and genuinely funny comedy set in the small-scale maritime community around the Thames estuary, shot in naturalistic mode a world away from the portentous melodrama of She three years later. Billy, a chirpy orphan for whom the word urchin could have been coined, is determined to find a family of his own, and attaches himself to sailor Sam Brown, who works a modest little merchant ship that sails the Thames estuary, where, along with his dog, Matey, he wangles his way into the affections of the crew, who pretend to believe his tale that Sam is his real father. It's a film of many charms, including several little grace notes of domestic detail - Sam descends into his cabin for a few moments of peace to play his concertina; sailors' wives have a nice cup of tea and a gossip in their immaculate little parlours. As well as relaxed performances from all the adult players, Bobby Rudd as Billy is tremendously good, natural and doggedly unsentimental, Matey the dog ([played by ‘Montmorency') is a delight, and the whole film is fresh and sharp. As The Bioscope's critic wrote in 1922 ‘ This is a real comedy in every sense of the word, and it will make everyone who sees it feel better.'

Final feature of my day was a triumph by any standards - The Lost World, directed by Harry O Hoyt, made in 1925. Based on the Conan Doyle novel, it sees the eccentric and irascible Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) embark on an expedition to find living dinosaurs on an isolated plateau in South America, accompanied by sundry adventurers and the daughter (Bessie Love) of the explorer whose diary sets them on their quest. It's brisk and funny, and the stop-go motion special effects, by Willis O'Brien, daddy of all animators (and mentor of the great Ray Harryhausen), who later was to create the effects on King Kong, are spectacular even now. The sequence where the dinosaur breaks loose and terrorises the London streets is the progenitor of so many such scenes over the years, but still has bite and originality. One can only wonder at the effect of these ‘realistic' scenes set in known locations on the cinemagoers at the time. ‘The effect is extraordinary,' wrote Movie Weekly in 1925. ‘We have ceased wondering how the picture was filmed.'

All in all an enjoyable day, but strangely enough, the film that I liked most was a fragment of documentary from 1910, In the Calm Waters of the Yare, all that remains of a longer piece on a Scottish fishing fleet, an uncomplicated look at a group of young Scottish women who spent each year travelling the length of the east coast of Britain following the herring fleet, gutting and packing the catch at every port it came into. Highly skilled but tedious, dirty and dangerous work, their knives ripping open herring at a rate of nearly one per second, yet these young women had a grace and an independence, looking you in the eye through the camera lens as they stroll arm in arm down the quay, unfranchised, almost certainly destined for hard lives in poverty and without much respite from demands of their husbands and children to come, but for a brief time free and fearless.