STARRING Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston

This 1974 neo-noir mystery film directed by Roman Polanski, written by Robert Towne, and set in 1930s Los Angeles, is loosely inspired by the California water wars—early 20th-century conflicts over critical water rights in this city that nature made a desert.  It received widespread critical acclaim on release for its direction, screenplay, cinematography, and performances—particularly those of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston.  Writing in 2013, upon its re-release, critic Peter Bradshaw wrote: “What the passage of time has done for this superlative film is progressively lessen our sense of its being simply a modern pastiche of the classic 30s gumshoe thrillers.  The time-gap has narrowed, and it now looks like a classic in a direct line of succession to those earlier pictures.… The dialogue is crackling (“Are you alone?” – “Isn’t everyone?”) and the set pieces, like the one in the anti-semitic old people’s home, are just superb.  Unmissable.”

DURATION: 2 hours 11 minutes

📽️ Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails.

📽️ Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️ Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on. Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️ If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

STARRING: Orson Welles, Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh with Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Marlene Dietrich.

Returning to Hollywood after a decade in Europe, Welles directed and starred, giving one of his most Shakespearean performances as the ageing, corrupt police chief Captain Quinlan in a small US town on the Mexico border.  During post-production, however, creative differences between Welles and Universal executives resulted in Welles removal from the film, to which Universal applied a more conventional editing style and ordering reshoots, much to Welles’ chagrin.  In a 58-page memo outlining his creative vision for the film, he asked that his version be restored.  In 1998, the instructions in this 1957 memo were applied to the film’s restoration by editor Walter Murch and producer Rick Schmidlin, who meticulously recut the film to 111 minutes, removed studio-added credits (and Henry Mancini’s music) from the famous, breath-takingly prolonged opening tracking shot, and restored the parallel narrative structure according to Welles’ wishes.

DURATION: 1 hour 51 minutes

📽️ Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails.

📽️ Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️ Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on. Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️ If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

STARRING Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall with Martha Vickers

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall sizzled in To Have and Have Not, and were promptly teamed again in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel.  Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to unravel the intrigue around his youngest daughter Carmen.  “With lighting as murky as its characters’ motivations, The Big Sleep is considered part of the cycle of urban thrillers known as film noir, yet the smoldering chemistry between the offscreen lovers results in something closer to screwball comedy.  The plot is famously difficult to follow: the legend goes that Hawks phoned Chandler during the shoot to check who killed the Sternwood chauffeur, and even Chandler didn’t know” (BFI).  You will revel in every turn, and not care.  

DURATION: 1 hour 54 minutes

📽️ Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails.

📽️ Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️ Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on. Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️ If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

This screening of La Vérité (1960) honours Brigitte Bardot (1934–2025) in what is widely regarded as her finest screen performance. At the height of the “BB” phenomenon — when Bardot embodied a new, provocative image of womanhood and was largely confined to roles as a carefree, sensual ingénue — Henri-Georges Clouzot radically redefined her screen persona, transforming her into a tragic heroine at the centre of a courtroom drama where truth splinters into competing versions.

Inspired by a 1959 murder trial Clouzot reported on for Jours de France, the film reflects his shock at the workings of criminal justice and his conviction that truth is fundamentally ambiguous. Urged by producer Raoul Lévy to use Bardot differently, Clouzot was fascinated by her sensuality and contradictions, and entrusted her with a rare, serious role that exposes both emotional depth and vulnerability.

Bardot plays Dominique Marceau, a young woman who breaks with her bourgeois background and plunges into a turbulent Parisian life of freedom and excess — ending with the death of her lover, a gifted young conductor. Crime of passion, desperate act or tragic accident? As testimonies clash and flashbacks erupt, Dominique’s impulsive existence is laid bare alongside the prejudices of a moralistic society.

Oscar-nominated and a major commercial success, La Vérité remains both a fierce indictment of institutional hypocrisy and a lasting testament to Bardot’s magnetic presence, vulnerability and defiance at the dawn of the 1960s.

David will show one of the world's most desirable film posters from the museum’s collection at the beginning of the screening - for Bardot in ‘Le Mepris’.

📽️ Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails.

📽️ Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️ Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on. Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️ If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

Kent MOMI presents … HOT BRITAIN (a series of films appropriate to the season)

We promised you a season of 'Hot Britain' and in a literal sense things don't get much hotter than in our final 'mystery film', 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire'. Val Guest's 1961 science-fiction disaster flick is one of the classic apocalypse-themed films of its day.  Guest was a prolific filmmaker who began his career in the 1930s, but is best know for Hammer productions The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and of course The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Pax Films/ Val Guest Productions).

Shot in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film was partly made on location in London and Brighton, and used matte painting to create images of abandoned cities and desolate landscapes.

 Writing in The Observer in 2014, Philip French considered it “... one of British cinema’s liveliest nuclear angst pictures, which unfolds in flashback from a world filmed through a golden filter to suggest it’s about to ignite. This terminal crisis results from our planet being put out of kilter by simultaneous H-bomb tests on both sides of the iron curtain. The film is both an engaging period piece, because it views the grim news from the Fleet Street office of the Daily Express (where the hacks bash away at manual typewriters), and topical because it anticipates global warming.”

Look out for an uncredited Michael Caine, who appears briefly as a checkpoint cop.

📽️Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on.  Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

Kent MOMI presents … HOT BRITAIN (a series of films appropriate to the season)

Shot on location on Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland, and now considered a masterwork, Cul-de-sac was only the second of Polanski’s English-language feature films exploring themes of horror, frustrated sexuality and alienation, here enacted when two injured gangsters take refuge in the remote island castle of a young British couple in the North of England, spurring a series of mind games and violent altercations. 

“It was a difficult shoot, with Polanski’s perfectionism bringing him into frequent conflict with producers, crew and cast alike.  He openly loathed Stander, disliked Dorléac's film-star airs and was taken aback when Pleasence turned up for the first day's shooting with a freshly-shaven head.  A virtuoso set-piece, a continuous eight-minute shot in which George and Richard run through various blackly comic parodies of relationship stages on the beach while Teresa swims nude in the background, was initially created out of expediency but ended up nearly killing his female lead, as the freezing water brought Dorléac close to hypothermia and the crew rebelled when he asked for a third take.  But this on-set tension gave Cul-de-sac its constant jolts of electricity, and it remains Polanski's most unclassifiable and unpredictable film” (Michael Brook, BFI). 

📽️Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on.  Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

Kent MOMI presents … HOT BRITAIN (a series of films appropriate to the season)

Joseph Losey’s dark 1963 satire The Servant was the first of his three film collaborations with Harold Pinter, a taut psychological drama of the relationships between four central characters, exploring tensions relating to social class and sexuality.

 On its re-release in 2021, Peter Bradshaw reflected: “Gay sexuality is everywhere and nowhere in The Servant … It is a woman who seduces Tony, but it is a man (Barrett) who pulls the strings, effecting the seduction at one remove.  Pinter’s own elliptical, disquieting dialogue is able to hint, imply, suggest, seduce, repulse in precisely the way that gay men were forced to adopt in 1963, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence.  The Servant is like a nightmarish version of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster: the benign, discreet and all-knowing servant effectively controlling everything in the life of the feather-headed young man who is notionally in charge”.  A superbly sinister performance by Dirk Bogarde as Barrett, a disturbing self-evisceration by James Fox as Tony, pitch-perfect tartiness from Sarah Miles, and a career best from Wendy Craig as Tony’s frustrated upper-crust fiancée.  

📽️Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help keep the lights on.  Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

Kent MOMI presents … HOT BRITAIN (a series of films appropriate to the season)

Considered “unfilmable” when Kubrick acquired the rights around the time of its U.S. publication, Kubrick and producer James B. Harris were compelled to tone down the paedophilic elements that were central to Nabokov’s narrative.  The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita movie being made near-contemporaneously with the novel’s publication was worked into the advertising campaign, with the poster trumpeting “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”.

In a piece celebrating the film’s 60th anniversary in 2022, film critic Jesse Hassenger wrote: “Though it keeps much of Lolita’s pain offscreen, it doesn’t exactly use her slightly raised age (14) to excuse Humbert’s fixation, nor does it feel like a powder-keg provocation ahead of its time.  Kubrick prefers to flirt with bad taste by recasting sections of the movie as a dark comedy acting as a point of contrast that make its sadder moments all the starker.  Sixty years on, Lolita remains a curio – one with the strange, unnerving power of a half-repressed memory.”  Stand-out and manic performances by Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon, as the ‘nymphet’”.

📽️Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails.  Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators.

📽️Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5 per person to help us keep the lights on.  Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

📽️If you buy tickets and are subsequently unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your seat(s) to someone else.

Kent MOMI presents … HOT BRITAIN (a series of films appropriate to the season!)

It’s worth recalling the original impact of Jack Clayton’s trailblazing 1959 film, reflected in its six Academy Award nominations.  It won two: for Simone Signoret’s dazzlingly charismatic performance, and for Neil Paterson’s screen adaptation of John Braine’s of-the-moment 1957 best-seller.  (Hermione Baddeley’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress was achieved off the back of her 2 minutes and 19 seconds of screen-time – the shortest ever performance to win an Oscar nomination.  Also look out also for a coquettish young secretary played by Prunella Scales).

“Room at the Top gave us Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton, the smouldering, ambitious young working-class Yorkshireman with a chip on his shoulder and a burning desire to get on, and get laid … a drama of class conflict and male frustration in a world where nice girls wouldn’t or if they did pregnancy was shatteringly immediate. … a pungent time capsule for postwar Britain where nasty snobbish remarks could be exchanged at the Rotary club.” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian).

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Film starts 6.30 with a brief introduction. Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5pp to help us keep the lights on. Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

Kent MOMI presents … HOT BRITAIN (a series of films appropriate to the season)

Ken Russell’s powerful adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel, released at the end of 1969, cemented his reputation as a director.  According to Mark Kermode: “In any other country, Russell would have been feted as the illustrious maestro who made D.H. Lawrence come alive”. 

Writing in 2019, American filmmaker Joe Talbot appraised the film thus: “Women in Love […] seems to condemn England and its hypocrisies, while also presenting it as an enchanting on screen world overflowing with spirited characters, fabulously anachronistic costumes, breath-taking locales, and joyfully choreographed dance sequences.  It’s critical of a time and place that it also depicts as alluring.  Alan Bates plays a thinly veiled stand-in for D.H. Lawrence, spouting proto-hippie philosophy about free love—which gives you some idea of why the book was so perfect to revisit in the sixties.  Oliver Reed’s character receives the same complex treatment that England does—he’s both a tightly wound capitalist who’s cringe-inducingly cruel to his workforce and a deeply tormented soul…”

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Films start 6.30 with a brief introduction from the curators. Entry is free with a yearly ticket, although we suggest a small donation of £5pp to help keep the lights on.  Yearly tickets can be purchased on the door (£7.50 adult / £6.00 concessions).

Out of the Past: ‘Women of Desire, Myth, and Power’

Kent MOMI presents a lineup of unforgettable women—rebels, lovers, warriors, and icons—who challenge expectations, redefine power, and rewrite their own myths. From sultry femme fatales to cross-dressing queens, these films celebrate the electrifying presence of women who refuse to be tamed.

Greta Garbo commands the screen as Sweden's legendary queen, a ruler torn between duty and passion. Often read as queer-coded, this lush historical drama explores power, passion, and the intoxicating freedom of living on one's own terms.

Raised as a monarch rather than as a woman, Christina resists marriage and duty, until her fateful encounter—while dressed as a man—with a Spanish ambassador (John Gilbert) threatens the throne with its most dangerous adversary: love. In the final, haunting close-up Garbo’s timeless face, still and unreadable, is a blank page onto which the audience projects their own longing. [Running time 1h 39min]

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Film starts 6.30 with a brief introduction from Dr. Natasha.

Out of the Past: ‘Women of Desire, Myth, and Power’

Kent MOMI presents a lineup of unforgettable women—rebels, lovers, warriors, and icons—who challenge expectations, redefine power, and rewrite their own myths. From sultry femme fatales to cross-dressing queens, these films celebrate the electrifying presence of women who refuse to be tamed.

Sex symbol of her time and a masterful actress, Polish star Pola Negri leads an all-out comedic rebellion as Rischka, a fearless female bandit in Lubitsch's most whimsical and visually extravagant German film. With its surreal set designs and absurd humour, this silent-era gem is a wild ride through a world where a woman with a pistol and a wicked grin holds all the power.

Already one of Germany's biggest silent film stars, Negri was a favourite of director Ernst Lubitsch, with whom she made several films. Her extraordinary ability to switch between comic and tragic genres and bold, modern appeal made her an icon of 1920s European cinema and Die Bergkatze showcases her at her most exuberant. But this film also marks the end of an era—just one year later, Negri would leave Germany to launch a dazzling Hollywood career, becoming one of the first European actresses to leap to American stardom. [Running time 1h 25min]

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Film starts 6.30 with a brief introduction from Dr. Natasha.

Out of the Past: ‘Women of Desire, Myth, and Power’

Kent MOMI presents a lineup of unforgettable women—rebels, lovers, warriors, and icons—who challenge expectations, redefine power, and rewrite their own myths. From sultry femme fatales to cross-dressing queens, these films celebrate the electrifying presence of women who refuse to be tamed.

Director Josef von Sternberg famously spotted Marlene Dietrich at a Berlin revue, soon after she gained fame for her ambiguous role in the musical Es liegt in der Luft, where she sang provocative lesbian duets with Margo Lion. Sternberg was captivated by her androgynous magnetism and the way she turned heads with her sultry, suggestive performances. He brought that energy to Morocco, shaping Dietrich's Hollywood debut around her ability to blur gender lines and seduce at will. [Running time 1hr 32min]

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails. Film starts 6.30 with a brief introduction from Dr. Natasha.

“Out of the Past” is an ongoing screening series foregrounding the history and prehistory of the film medium, historical genres (swashbucklers, slapstick, romance, etc), and cinema’s engagements with history, literature and theatre.

Keaton’s 1926 The General is deservedly well known. But his remarkable historical imagination first took flight in this charming and unexpected comedy, set during the very early (and visibly uncomfortable) years of the railroad. This short feature will be preceded by one of Keaton’s greatest short films, The Boat (1921) – another single location masterpiece. [Running time: 1h 14m]

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK EIGHT Friday 4th October

Pandora's Box / Die Büchse der Pandora (G.W.Pabst, Germany, 1929)

Introduced by Natasha. Running time: 133 minutes.

A season of films about desire cannot do without Louise Brooks. Her iconic black bob and dancer's body epitomized the ideal of a modern woman and a style icon in the 1920s like no one else.  As part of our eight weeks of screenings, we are showcasing Pandora's Box, a masterpiece of German silent cinema and the first of two films that the German director G.W.Pabst and Louise Brooks would make together.

Pabst's film was based on very popular at that time plays by Frank Wedekind, about a seductive young woman named Lulu, who is both immoral and waif-like innocent, and whose uninhibited nature brings ruin to herself and her many lovers. For this role, Pabst wanted an actress who was not acting but – the most challenging task! - could just be herself before the camera. He dreamt of casting Brooks – herself a free spirit and a real jazz girl - from the moment he saw her in Howard Hawks's A Girl in Every Port (1928).

The film faced wide criticism and censorship upon its initial release due to its bold exploration of sexuality and female desire. Despite this, Louise Brooks's subtle yet sexually charged portrayal remains one of the most modern performances of the silent era..

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK SEVEN Friday 27th September

Angst essen Seele auf [Ali: Fear Eats the Soul]

Introduced by Natasha. Running time: 93 minutes

Our next screening celebrates the 50th anniversary of what is probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most influential work, an unconventional love story that combines sharp social analysis with emotional intensity: Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

One evening in Munich, an elderly cleaning lady named Emmi (Brigitte Mira) seeks shelter from a rainstorm in a bar frequented by immigrants.  To her surprise, the jukebox plays a 1920s Schlager, and Ali, a handsome Moroccan migrant worker (El Hedi ben Salem), asks her to dance ... They unexpectedly fall in love and get married, to the shock of their families, friends and colleagues.  However, this brave, tender and fragile romance soon faces the harsh realities of racism and ageism.

Around 1971, when he was already a cinephile and prolific filmmaker, Fassbinder discovered Douglas Sirk, a German émigré known for infusing classy Hollywood melodramas with hard-hitting criticism.  Fear Eats the Soul harnesses the same emotional power to reveal the fascist thinking still underlying German culture: indeed, it was conceived as an interpretation of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955).  The film also reflects Fassbinder’s tumultuous romantic relationship with the actor who plays Ali – El Hedi ben Salem, a Moroccan immigrant who met Fassbinder in 1971 at a gay swimming pool in Paris.

This direct and courageous love story was urgent and important in 1974 and remains so in 2024. 

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK SEVEN Friday 20th September

La Piscine

Introduced by Natasha. Running time: 122 minutes

Picture, for a second, Romy Schneider, Alain Delon, Jane Birkin, and Maurice Ronet in revealing swimwear, bronzed bodies basking in the lazy St. Tropez sun and reflected in the shimmering waters of a villa’s swimming pool … No, this isn't a daydream – it's La Piscine, by Jacques Deray, the fourth most popular movie at the French box office in 1969.  The story revolves around a former ménage à trois that becomes a ménage à quatre, with deadly consequences.

La Piscine was resurrected from the depths of time, restored, and re-released in 2021.  Critics have since praised it as an “icily erotic” and “superbly controlled thriller”, “a master class in the subgenre”.

The film reunited the 1960s on-and-off-screen “dream couple” Alain Delon and Romy Schneider after their dramatic break-up and Schneider’s marriage to German director Harry Meyen.  Delon reportedly insisted that the filmmaker Jacques Deray cast Schneider in th efilm, and their troubled shared history and intense emotional connection give the film its raw authenticity.  “I wanted constantly to go towards the gaze”, Deray confessed.  “I was lucky to have Delon, Romy Schneider or Ronet in front of my lens”.  Add dreamy music by Michel Legrand (and a film-themed summer cocktail by Dr. Natasha), and you get the Indian Summer night of your dreams! 

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK FIVE Friday 13th September

Far from the Madding Crowd

Introduced by Joss. Running time: 169 minutes

Julie Christie shot to fame as the amoral model at the centre of John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), for which she won an Oscar, and she was, indeed, the darling of the 1960s.  When Schlesinger came to adapt Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece, Far from the Madding Crowd, in 1967, there can have been no doubt as to who would play headstrong, independent, beautiful Bathsheba Everdene, one of the heroines (like Tess) in whom Hardy most invested his own deep-seated romantic yearnings and sensual feelings. 

Bathsheba has three suitors – a good man, as the name implies, solid Gabriel Oak, who loves her with open eyes (Alan Bates, who won the Golden Globe for Best Actor); an older man who desires her to the point of obsession, farmer Boldwood (a stand-out, neurotic performance by Peter Finch); and red-coated Sergeant Troy (Terence Stamp at his sneering and handsome best), who dazzles and excites her while himself desiring another woman.  Their intertwined and conflicting desires and fates play out in the lush and timeless landscape of rural Dorset, where the film was shot: nature itself is part of the film’s appeal to all our senses. 

Watch out for the famous scene in which Troy performs his sword exercise around Bathsheba’s body – one of the original novel’s most charged and brilliant sequences, in which Hardy managed to write about sex without writing about sex, (much to the secret enjoyment of Victorian audiences), proving – like this film – that what is only half glimpsed is more erotic than what is openly flaunted. 

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK FOUR Friday 6th September

Matrimonio all'Italiana [Marriage Italian Style]

Introduced by Natasha. Running time: 102 minutes

She is Filumena, a resilient and somewhat naive Neapolitan prostitute in war-torn Italy; he is Domenico, a bourgeois business owner who does not take love affairs too seriously …  Kent MOMI welcomes you to a night of Neapolitan heat, desire, laughter, and tears with Marriage Italian Style (1964), by Vittorio De Sica.

In 1964, De Sica returned to Naples to shoot a film adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo's Filumena Marturano, his most well-known work, which had been on stage worldwide.  De Sica chose a catchy new title that was easy to translate for international distribution, re-shaped the three-act comedy into a series of flashbacks, added a dramatic soundtrack by Amando Trovajoli and dressed Sophia Loren in superbly revealing costumes.  The result was a film that is still loved and watched across the world.  Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, at the peak of their careers, solidified their reputation as one of the greatest on-screen duos in this timeless film, which starts as a bedroom farce but gradually evolves into something disarmingly moving.  Mastroianni impeccably embodied the handsome scoundrel, while Loren delivered (in the opinion of many critics) her best performance, which earned her a second Oscar nomination, a David Di Donatello prize, and other international awards.  

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK THREE Friday 30th August

Lola Montès  

Introduced by David. Running time: 116 minutes) 

There is more controversy about Max Ophuls’s subtle and visually ravishing last film, Lola Montès (1955), than almost any other film.  Considered by the Nouvelle Vague critics to be among the10 greatest films of all time, it was pronounced a flop on first release, in Paris, in a 140 minute version, and immediately withdrawn from circulation.  The 114-minute 2020 French version restoration we present this evening is the most complete version available to date.  (The film was shot simultaneously in French and German, and exists also in an English dubbed version.)  This was Ophuls’ only film in Technicolor and Cinemascope, processes that showed his innovative tracking shots to best advantage and allowed him to use saturated colours as an ingredient in storytelling.

The film is loosely based on the life of the famed 19th-century courtesan Lola Montes, who excited and shocked her contemporaries in equal measure.  Ophuls, however, is not interested in historical drama: he wants to show that women are still commodities, manipulated by men, in 1955.  He purposely concentrates on the end of Lola’s life, when she is both dangerously ill and still determined to be her own woman, intercutting her present life as a circus performer and her life as mistress of, amongst a multitude of others, Franz List and King Ludwig 1 of Bavaria, who lost his throne as a result of their relationship.

Faced with a leading lady he had not chosen, Martine Carol, Ophuls turned her limitations to advantage, indicating to the audience that it was Lola’s physical involvement with the rich and famous rather than her beauty or talent that made her famous – by paying to kiss her hand they become intimate, at one remove, with a world-famous composer and a monarch.  However, audiences disliked seeing their new star treated in this way, and shunned the film.  It is held together by a superb performance by Peter Ustinov as a money-grubbing ringmaster – both the narrator of her life and her last exploiter. 

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK TWO Friday 23rd August

The Son of the Sheik

Introduced by Joss. Running time: 68 minutes

Rudolph Valentino died, from a ruptured ulcer, in 1926, mourners lined the streets of New York, weeping, in an uncanny presaging of the funeral of Princess Diana, in 1997.  

What they mourned was the erotic promise and romantic possibility he opened up, on screen, for women and men, straight and queer, worldwide, through the uninhibited and fantasy-enabling medium of the silent film.  He had broken open the closed codes of gender and desire that still constricted the “roaring” twenties.  He was dangerous. 

As classically beautiful as Garbo, an unlikely combination of gigolo and master, popular fetish and screen artist, Valentino danced the tango into fame as the Argentinian playboy, Julio, who is chastened by love in Rex Ingram’s smash hit The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1924).  His subsequent roles both showcased his masculine beauty – a rare and strange occurrence in 1920s America – and the price he would pay for his type of fame … which was death.

We introduce the outrageous and highly enjoyable romp, Son of the Sheik (1926), with a short original presentation (with clips and images) of Valentino’s career, image and meanings for the century after his death.  In this, there is a surprise appearance by F. Scott Fitzgerald, literary architect of the “American Dream”.  (Running time: 68 minutes film + 20 minutes introduction)  JM

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.

Kent MOMI is pleased to announce a new eight-week programme of screenings at the museum. The screenings, collectively entitled CINEMA OF DESIRE will run every Friday evening from 16th August to 4th October.  See below for the intoxicating details!

WEEK ONE Friday 16th August

Flesh and the Devil

Introduced by Joss & David. Running time: 112 minutes.

Newcomer Garbo, in only her third Hollywood appearance, though still fresh from her European triumphs in Gosta Berling’s Saga (1924) and The Joyless Street (1925), shot to the front rank of stars in Flesh and the Devil, in which she was paired – momentously, for the first time – with the man who became one of her many lovers, John Gilbert, who inherited the crown as Hollywood’s handsomest leading man following the death of Rudolph Valentino (who we encounter next week).  The film proves, if proof were needed, that dialogue can be a bar to intense screen emotion: its silence is truly golden.

Flesh and the Devil is also an intensely visual, almost luminous film – the perfect setting for a woman whose mathematically perfect and endlessly expressive face was (in the words of one contemporary) almost “a Platonic dream of beauty”.  Clarence Brown’ s well-paced and inventive direction and his remarkable cameraman (Garbo’s favourite) William Daniels’ superlative use of light and shadow make Flesh and the Devil as compelling to the eye today as it was in 1926.  (Watch for the perfect scene in a which a cigarette is lit.)  

 The friendship of Ulrich (Lars Hanson, star of the late silent classics The Scarlet Letter and The Wind) and Leo (Gilbert), is destroyed by a beautiful woman, Felicitas (Garbo), devoid of moral principles, who ultimately prefers wealth over passion.  The result is two duels, one powerfully presented in silhouette.  One almost applauds when Garbo meets her end in frozen waters, so successful is she at portraying an unprincipled vamp.  But, luckily, film resurrected her and the dreams she made possible, in film after beautiful film. 

To reserve places, please hit the button, below, or email info@kentmomi.org

First come, first served with a limited capacity of 30 places.

Doors open 5.30, for drinks, nibbles & classic cocktails by Dr. Natasha.

Films commence 6.30pm sharp.

Screenings are FREE to Kent MOMI yearly ticket holders, but a £5 donation is suggested, to help us keep the lights on. Museum tickets can be bought at the door, and are valid for a year.