Like Cubism itself, PaceWildenstein’s “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism” is dense, a bit startling, totally audacious — and possibly seminal. The exhibition, which borrows major works from museums around the world and places them in the company of early film projections and filmmaking paraphernalia, has a theory about Cubism that seems to have been almost entirely overlooked, but which makes sense: that cinematography was a major impetus of this revolutionary style. In more than one sense of the word, this is a challenging show.

The exhibition — like Cubism — seems to have had two inventors: The founder of PaceWildenstein, Arne Glimcher, who is also a movie impresario, harbored an initial hunch for some years; his gallery director, Bernice Rose, a former director of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, saw it through with scholarly tenacity.

Their revisionist proposition could prove as disruptive to received scholarship as Picasso and Braque’s hermetic visual language games were to conventions of picture-making. What has to arouse skepticism is why the movie inspiration would have been suppressed. One answer is that everything was suppressed: The artists were notoriously tight-lipped about their intentions and inspirations in inventing Cubism, especially as both moved on fairly quickly from this secretive stylistic moment in their careers.

Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, recounts that the artist visited Barcelona’s first movie house in December 1896, just months after the new invention had galvanized Paris: He was 15 at the time, and had yet to see his first Cézanne. His first painting, now lost, was of a cavalry charge witnessed at the movies.

The compelling evidence, however, is to be found not in biography or correspondence but in the pictures themselves. Remaining circumspect about the relative position of cinema among the sources and affinities of Cubism, with cinema an addition rather than a substitution for such points of context as Manet, Cézanne, Quantum Mechanics, tribal art, and so forth, Ms. Rose’s 110-page essay relies on fastidiously close reading of the works.

Her own obsession with the subject arose from writing some years ago about Picasso’s “Female Nude” (1910), lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art both to this exhibition and a Picasso survey she organized in Milan, Italy, in 2002. With Mr. Glimcher’s insight about Cubism and film in mind, she began to read the inscrutable head as a projector and camera set upon a tripod. In the early movie houses the projector was yet to be hidden in a booth, but was a tangible, theatrical presence among the audience. Ms. Rose relates the cinematic apparatus to two strong impulses in Cubism: the sense of the artist as a neutral, almost mechanical recorder of chaotic, urban modern experience, and a fascination with automation. The exhibition is rich with loans of equipment from such institutions as the Museum of the Moving Image. Their various mechanisms, lenses, and horns find visual echo in the jagged, mechanical imagery of the paintings gathered close by.

Thinking of Cubism in relation to film makes new sense of its austere palette and its impersonal touch. These have often been attributed to the sense of scientific invention in the hermetic phase of the Picasso-Braque collaboration when, tethered like mountaineers, in Braque’s phrase, they produced canvases that are barely distinguishable from one another.

Greeting visitors to the exhibition is a large-scale DVD reconstruction of an early Thomas Edison film of a dancer imitating Loïe Fuller with her whirling colored skirts. Ms. Rose sees Fuller’s dance in relation to a series of nudes that were spinoffs of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) that segued into his first experiments with a Cubist description of space. It is faceting that is the most radical and equally the most disconcerting aspect of Cubism.

It is thanks to this organization of pictorial space that you get a sense of planes at odd angles to one another, a bit like a fragmented mirror or a prism. It was a break from the traditional perspective, in place in Western art since the Renaissance, of the picture as a window onto reality, a reassuringly composed image of the world. The cinematic analogy, ironically, disrupts this disruptive interpretation — if hardly normalizing it — by suggesting the canvas as a kind of jumbled up roll of film. The viewer becomes the projector, joining these cinematic frames together to form a unified, but more to the point, a moving image.

Newspaper and journals were awash with detailed, technical descriptions of movie technology and how it worked. The public was understandably fascinated and was as savvy about trick photography as today’s moviegoers are about animated special effects. The exhibition has two further projections of early films, with a program of 120 films Picasso and Braque might have been able to see assembled by a film historian, Jennifer Wild. One aspect of early moviegoing experience that connects tantalizingly with the Cubist project is the degree to which programs were improvisatory and disjointed. Projectionists were the scratch DJs of their time, splicing together fragments of film to produce montages, thrilling audiences with sudden leaps from comedy scenarios to footage of exotic locales to news items. Audiences were far more excited by the form than the content, anyway.

Sometimes, different features would be separated by slides with captions: When the slides went in upside down, the audience roared. This is another piece of movie lore to aid understanding of Cubism, offering an alternative explanation of their love of lettering and disjointed, often inverted, words collaged from newspapers.

Virtually anything you catch in the film show — projected in one space in a mock up of a Paris movie house with period benches — will make immediate and compelling art historical sense of the masterpieces gathered around.

“Masterpieces” is the operative word, as this show is the most important gathering in New York of classical Cubist pictures since MoMA’s “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” in 1989. Early film was as often deadpan documentary as screwball comedy, with cinéastes sent out to film virtually anything. A documentary about a violin repair shop, showing an artisan disassembling an instrument surrounded by his tools, could almost be a Braque painting turned into a movie. From the outset, filmmakers loved to have buildings collapse and hapless victims be swallowed up by a fireplace: It was a moment when popular entertainment was deconstructive for the sheer fun of it.

Until June 23 (32 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-421-3292).