This isn’t the Lido di Venezia or a Mediterranean Beach at Cannes, and you’re likelier to see gray rain sweeping down the English Channel than starlets sweeping in from Hollywood here. But Deal, a small seaside town in Kent, England, is home to one of the most remarkable repositories of cinema history you’ll find anywhere, run by two of the most enthusiastic — and some might say important — collectors of movie artifacts.

Kent Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is the brainchild of Joss Marsh and her husband, David Francis OBE. And both have history. David was curator of the UK’s National Film and Television Archive before becoming Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Joss is a respected film academic in her own right and the daughter of the celebrated production designer Terrence Marsh. Yet Kent MOMI is the result of 50-plus years of collecting that started, for Joss, with a bonfire.

Kindling a passion

“One day, my father had a bit of tidy up, and I discovered he’d got rid of his original drawings for ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ and ‘Oliver.’ All gone on a bonfire because he needed space in his garage and thought nobody wanted them,” she explains. “From that moment, I was on a mission because this material is an important record of an important art form. I became very interested in archives and even ended up marrying an archivist.”

Joss describes her husband as the man who has probably single-handedly done more to preserve worldwide film heritage than anybody who’s ever lived. “But he’ll never tell you that because he’s too modest,” she says. She adds that his importance comes not just from the thousands of items he’s amassed and the institutions he’s helped create but the depth of his enthusiasm.

“When David first joined the UK’s National Film Archive (now the BFI National Archive), there was little interest in anything that had happened before cinema was born — the 250 years of projected image experience before that was totally neglected,” she says. “So, he started collecting — even climbing into dumpsters. That’s how we have 20,000 magic lantern slides and can still perform with them at Kent MOMI.”

Pioneering work

Between them, Joss and David have been instrumental in creating a coherent cinematic and pre-cinematic record of moving images. Even establishments like the Christie-equipped Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles are built, to some extent, on their pioneering work. Work that shows little sign of slowing down despite David entering his 90th year.

This little museum on the English coast, run wholly by volunteers and sustained by the enthusiasm of local people, could be dismissed as a mere hobby — except it isn’t. It’s a perfect example of an enduring enthusiasm for moving images and a desire to see that history preserved and explained. There’s an increasing realization that Joss’s father, and his bonfire, were delightfully wrong. People are interested in this “stuff,” as Joss understood all along.

“Our research collection has international significance — it’s like an iceberg with seven-eighths of the collection invisible,” she explains. “And that’s what’s driving us now. There is an urgent need to digitize and create a searchable collection, so people know where to find us.”

It seems the fire her father lit has preserved more than it ever destroyed.