A scene from The Hardest Button to Button, a music video by French musician-turned-director Michel Gondry made with the celebrated alt-rock duo the White Stripes.

Still think music videos are mostly about the music? An unusual exhibit opening this week at the RISD Museum in Providence may change your mind — or at least expand your audio-visual horizons.

The exhibit, which opens Friday, is called “Music Video/Silent Film: Innovations in the Moving Image,” and it makes the case that old-fashioned silent movies and state-of-the-art music videos have more in common than you might think. Both art forms, for example, are adept at telling stories through sounds and images rather than through traditional spoken dialogue. And both use a wide array of visual and auditory tools — everything from stop-motion animation to carefully synchronized soundtracks — to get their points across.

The show’s “artworks” are similarly eclectic. Ballet mecanique, a film by the French artist Fernand Leger, mixes sounds and images into something resembling a visual symphony. Made in 1924, it features pictures of everyday people and objects set to a bouncy, waltz-like score. Among the show’s more recent works are music videos by the White Stripes, the Beastie Boys and the French art-rock group The Chemical Brothers.

Curator Maya Allison says the idea for the show began with a simple observation.

“My academic background is in experimental film and film history,” she says. “But I also grew up in the middle of the whole music video, MTV revolution. Most people, I think, naturally assume that these two art forms — experimental films and music videos — are completely separate. But the more music videos I watched, the more I noticed that they were using many of the same techniques found in avant garde films.”

Eventually, Allison says, it dawned on her that today’s music video directors face many of the same problems that confronted early filmmakers such as Leger and Russian avant garde director Dziga Vertov. Foremost among them: how to tell a story without using traditional dialogue or narration to advance the action.

“For people like Leger and Vertov, the music and the filmed images had to carry the bulk of the story. They didn’t have the luxury of recording people’s voices. In music videos, you have a similar challenge, although for a different reason. A video director can’t use traditional dialogue because it might interfere with the song.”

(Note: As part of Friday’s opening, the full 70-minute version of Vertov’s masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera, will be shown in the RISD Auditorium in Market Square. The screening will include live musical accompaniment by Yakov Gubanov, composer-in-residence at the Harvard Film Archive and an associate professor at the Berklee School of Music. The 7:15 p.m. screening follows a 6:30 gallery talk by Allison at the museum.)

As the show’s curator, Allison faced some challenges of her own.

One was simply deciding which movies and videos to exhibit. Allison says that choosing silent-era films like those by Leger, Vertov and the American artist Man Ray was relatively easy.

“Most of these works are fairly well known in filmmaking circles,” she says. “Obviously there are other films we could have shown, but these pieces seemed to represent a good cross-section.”

Deciding which music videos to exhibit was another story. Thanks to the popularity of all-music cable channels such as MTV and VH-1, the list of potential music videos is virtually endless. Meanwhile, a number of once-experimental techniques, including handheld cameras and rapid jump-cuts and montage sequences, have become so popular with music video makers that they no longer seem particularly unusual.

Allison’s solution was to focus on a relatively small group of music video “auteurs,” including French musician-turned-director Michel Gondry and British video-maker Chris Cunningham. Allison says both directors manage to combine experimental techniques with a knack for old-fashioned storytelling.

“Both Gondry and Cunningham have a reputation for being very innovative,” she says. “But they’re also very good at telling a story. Granted, it may not be a story with a traditional beginning, middle and end. But if you pay attention to what they’re doing, they almost always have a story to tell.”

ANOTHER CHALLENGE WAS how to present the films and videos to museum visitors.

Allison solved that problem by pairing one silent-era film with one MTV-era video. As visitors enter the exhibit, located on the first floor of the museum’s Daphne Farago Wing, they will see a series of small partitions, each outfitted with two video monitors. In one pairing, Leger’s Ballet mecanique will play alongside The Hardest Button to Button, a music video Gondry made with the celebrated alt-rock duo the White Stripes.

In the video, White Stripes drummer Meg White bangs away on her drums, and each time she does another Meg White magically appears in front of her. By the time the song is done, a conga line of hundreds of Meg Whites sitting atop hundreds of drum sets has marched across the screen.

Allison says similar techniques, including abrupt jump cuts and stop-motion animation, can be found in the Leger film. “In both cases, you have filmmakers using similar techniques to achieve similar ends,” she says.

A music video by Cunningham, meanwhile, will be paired with Le Retour a la raison (Return to Reason), a 1923 film by the American Surrealist artist Man Ray. In the video, Cunningham uses a variety of distorting effects to create an eerie visual accompaniment to a song by British electronic-music group Autechre. A similar fascination with the expressive possibilities of technical faults and “glitches” can be found Le Retour a la raison, which features several of the haunting X-ray-like photographs Ray dubbed “rayographs.”

Still, the show’s biggest challenge may be getting visitors to sit still long enough to watch her films and videos. In the museum world, it’s well known that while people will happily queue up to look at paintings and sculptures, getting them to sit still for even a short video can be difficult.

“Hopefully, people will be interested enough to stay for a while,” says Allison.

“Music Video/Silent Film: Innovations in the Moving Image” opens Friday at the RISD Musuem, 224 Benefit St. in Providence. The show runs through Jan. 15.