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This page
https://archive.org/details/moviesandfilms

...has a lot of collections, pretty well organized by genre -- comedy, sci-fi/horror, silent films, film noir, etc. I think many of those have some silent filent films. There are also the thousands of miscellaneous films, of course, in that area of the Archive, and other places too. (I concur with you that the Archive can be overwhelming!)

Like cartoons, you can view them from the page, without needing to download. But for larger files (usually longer films), you can have a smoother viewing experience, with no "buffering," if you download the file to your desktop or a flashdrive, and play it from there. To do that, I go to Download Options on the individual film's page, and click "view all." I usually choose the mp4 file format to download (right click or save-as). I don't know much about other file formats, or torrents; or a lot of the technical stuff that people refer to especially if they are tweaking an imperfect file. A good basic film viewer app that I use is called VLC, available free for mobile devices and desktop/laptop computers. It also works for audio files.

One thing about the Internet Archive is that anyone who makes a free account can upload videos. So you may see films that shouldn't be on the site if they are still under copyright (ie. bootlegs), because they were released more recently. Those are liable to be removed at any time, and the next time you come back, that particular link won't work. But the films in the main category folders are likely to be more stable links, if you are bookmarking them.

Enjoy!