Thanks to the efforts of archivists and collectors, the century-long deluge of silent films that were flushed into oblivion by the ravages of time and neglect has lately slowed to a mere torrent. Case in point — tonight, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will unveil a newly preserved print of silent comedienne Mabel Normand’s 1922 feature “Head Over Heels,” along with selected shorts from various points during Normand’s 18-year reign as “the female Chaplin.”

“Head Over Heels” is one of 16 features that Normand made for Samuel Goldwyn late in her career, and one of only three that still exist. “Nitrate won’t wait” is the film preservationist’s rallying cry — the long out-of-date state of the art negative and print stock is only slightly less volatile than gasoline. But as luck would have it, the tinted nitrate original that yielded tonight’s print has miraculously kept its molecular act together for decades while awaiting rescue in a Massachusetts basement.

At this late date, it’s far easier to scrutinize silent films themselves than it is to understand and to know the people who created them. Over the years the rumors and facts of a star’s life, the hype that surrounded them in their prime, and the vivid personalities of the characters they play blur together. Mabel Normand’s legacy is particularly distorted. Like her frequent Keystone co-star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, she was an enormously popular star who was felled by scandal. And, like Arbuckle, Normand’s popularity and image were so pronounced in her heyday that she didn’t just get her name above the title, she got it in the title (“Mabel’s Married Life” and “Mabel’s Busy Day,” both from 1914, are two examples). To teens and 20-something filmgoers, she was simply “Mabel,” and onscreen she was a delight.

Before entering pictures, Normand, a Staten Island native, worked as a model for commercial illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flag. Small and pretty with a high forehead, dark chestnut hair, and big brown eyes, she exuded a wholesome, untouchable quality perfectly suited for the new American century’s “Gibson Girl” look. In print ads her clean Protestant bearing and beauty sold soap and tooth powder. In film comedy, that seeming innocence became a built-in set-up for every gag. Despite her poised appearance, Normand was one of silent comedy’s most uninhibited physical female comedians.

“Mabel Normand wasn’t afraid to do slapstick and the same kind of stuff that her male counterparts were doing,” Ben Model, the accomplished film historian and silent film accompanist who will perform with tonight’s films on theater organ, said. “At a time when women didn’t do those kinds of things, she was taking falls, getting thrown into lakes, getting dragged through mud and all sorts of stuff like that. She was one of the boys, in a way.”

Normand was also one of the boys behind the camera. She shared directing credit with actor Mack Sennett, her onagain-off-again co-star both on screen and behind closed doors, and wrote and directed other pictures on her own. This evening’s program doesn’t showcase Normand the director. It does, however, boast shorts helmed by Arbuckle, Sennett, and Leo McCarey, three of Normand’s most sympathetic and expert collaborators.

“Mabel’s Dramatic Career” (1913) representing the Sennett years is, like “Head Over Heels,” a recent restoration. For the first time in decades this pioneering run-through for the self-referential film-within-a-film gags that would reach an apotheosis in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Junior” a few years later will be shown in 35 mm, at its full length, and with the original intertitles.

McCarey’s “Should Men Walk Home?” (1927) was Normand’s penultimate film before her premature retirement and death, not yet 40 years old, from tuberculosis in 1930. Implication in the murder of director William Desmond Taylor turned the public and the scandal-wracked film industry against her (one night in early 1922, Taylor was shot in the chest with a single bullet within a few minutes of Normand’s departure from his bungalow). Drug abuse weakened her and TB ate her alive. But even in tragically early twilight in a 1928 two-reeler, “you can’t take your eyes off of her,” Model says. “She still has this electricity.”

We tend, I think, to remember the ends of stories and of lives more than their potentially richer first and second acts. Mabel Norman is a perfect example of this. When Normand’s name is recalled today, it’s as a dweller in the Hollywood Babylon underworld — a victim of jazz-age movie star excess. Normand was, in the words of writer and contemporary Adele Rogers St. Johns, “not of this world,” and she certainly wasted no time in leaving it. But thanks to the work of the American Film Institute and other dedicated archives and libraries, the better world Normand really belonged to still exists. It’s a world that will shimmer back into existence when the lights go down, the music begins, and a beautiful and haunting smile once again comes alive on the Walter Reade Theater’s screen tonight.