Moving image museum reopens with new exhibits

A museum of moving images in Kent will reopen this weekend with new exhibitions.

The Museum of the Moving Image (Momi) in Deal will reopen for the summer season with additional new exhibitions about World War One in film and media, and Peeping and Projecting looking at peephole cinema.

The new exhibitions will include stills from the film The Battle of the Somme which are thought to have been shot in Deal.

Prof Jocelyn Marsh, curator of Momi, says visitors to the museum are "always taken aback" by the exhibitions.

Prof Marsh said: "Cinema wasn't a virgin birth. It had many ancestors. The primary one was the Magic Lantern but there were also shadow puppets, the silhouette and even photographs."

The Battle of the Somme, which is featured in the new exhibition, was the first film to recreate on screen dead bodies of British soldiers, a scene which proved controversial in 1916 when it was released.

Prof Marsh added: "Virtually every British adult saw it. There is a suggestion that these were [filmed] in practise trenches some of which were here outside Deal.

"You can't set up an 80lb (36kg) camera on a tripod and shoot the trenches for real because you would be dead within seconds."

An existing display of film posters at the museum which advertises the Ealing Studios output was recently added to by the daughter of artist S John Woods.

She revealed that he had lived in Deal's Water Street for 40 years and his paint-stained apron and brushes are on loan to the museum, alongside posters from some of the studio's most well-know movies.

The museum was opened in April 2018 by Prof Marsh and David Francis, who helped create the original Momi in London.

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