That will sound strange, but really, other than the few surviving segments in films like Ben Hur (Ramon Navarro, not Chuck Heston) there's not a lot of evidence of what actors of the silent era actually looked like in color. I remember an exhibit on costuming of the Silent Era and being amazed at exactly how colorful they were. I wish there was more of it around.
The flickering of the hand-cranked camera is still there. The lighting is what's fascinating, and in my eyes what makes this a masterpiece. It is the subject, bright, alinve, front-and-center, with the backdrop dark. All we are given is the actor, lit bright, floating in the void. We would see this in so many avant gadre films less than a decade later, but here, in 1922, it feels fresh.