Sometimes it seems as though many latter-day casual film buffs harbor a mistrust of American silent film. The most famous of the early American movie dramatists, D.W. Griffith, is better known as a purveyor of antiquated racist Victorian melodrama than as one of the 20th century’s most innovative and influential storytellers.

In 1997, the U.S. Congress created the National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization charged with administering and funding film restoration and archival efforts all over America. Thanks to the efforts of preservationists, collectors, and academics coordinated and supported through the Foundation’s auspices, the true range and breadth of America’s rich early film heritage is becoming more and more available to defend itself against whispered accusations of irrelevance. For good or ill, film history’s bloodiest aesthetic battles are being fought on home video. Apart from leading the charge, with its ongoing DVD series “Treasures From the National Film Preservation Foundation,” to keep early film from vanishing from the vaults, the NFPF has contributed some of the strongest evidence that the first four decades of American movie-making were an artistically precocious infancy worthy not just of re-discovery, but of outright immersion.

Like its two predecessors, the Foundation’s newest release compiles the efforts of dozens of archives, museums, and curators. But “Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934” doesn’t just celebrate film’s formative years. Over four discs containing more than 12 hours of material, “Treasures III” reveals the secret history of our movie industry’s youth spent in the service of almost every conceivable type of social reform agenda and political pedagogy. Four feature films and 44 short subjects include comedies, dramas, industrial films, documentaries, and animation, “Treasures III” engages, often with jaw-dropping directness, such issues as war, race, women’s rights, abortion, labor relations, the debt economy, immigration, organized crime, drug abuse, terrorism, homelessness, and patriotism at the soap-box level.

The “Treasures III” set has been organized into four thematically specific programs — The City Reformed, New Women, Toil and Tyranny, and Americans in the Making — each gathered around a single feature. The features showcase four very different directorial talents at threshold moments in their lives and careers. Within a year after he directed Disc 1’s full-length dramatic exposé on urban teen crime and punishment, “The Soul of Youth” (1920), William Desmond Taylor was the victim of a murder that rocked Hollywood and remains unsolved today.

In 1916, when Disc 2’s “Where are My Children” was made, actress-turned-director Lois Weber was becoming one of the highest-paid creative talents in an industry that had yet to install a glass ceiling for women. An astonishingly frank fictionalization of Margaret Sanger’s 1915 prosecution for encouraging birth control and abortion, “Where are My Children” contains some of the most patently oddball images among the bonanza of entertaining, eccentric, and memorable forms of expression that make up “Treasures III.” In order to illustrate the emotional underpinnings of the film’s pro-birth control, pro-abortion, and pro-eugenics stance, for instance, Weber conjures a heavenly tableau in which the souls of the unborn happily sit out eternity as winged, diapered angels.

Disc 3’s “The Godless Girl,” which historical consensus has incorrectly identified as the first pro-Indian Hollywood movie, is in a category all its own. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who was then in the twilight of a career running his own independent studio and on the threshold of a sound era rebirth that would make him a household name, “The Godless Girl” is a racy exploitation-tinged “exposé” on the consequences of youthful atheism. Within a year after it was made, the talkies’ awkward technical demands would set sophisticated visual staging and mobile camera film grammar back 10 years.

In addition to offering glimpses of narrative filmmaking’s surefooted early steps, “Treasures III” presents sponsored filmmaking initiatives by the Ford Motor Company, U.S. Steel, and one particularly entertaining case, our very own Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. Perhaps the earliest known traffic safety film, the BRT’s “The Cost of Carelessness,” a depiction of nearly every conceivable way for children to get hurt on Brooklyn’s electric trolley system circa 1913, is still bracing decades after the trolleys went the way of the 5-cent cigar. For contemporary residents, a sequence in which a careless driver careens out of Ditmas Park onto Flatbush Avenue and, eventually, an early death will seem disturbingly familiar.

Like so many of the issues, incidents, and ideas jammed into “Treasures III,” it illustrates that there’s only so far a city can evolve in a mere 98 years.