Behind a domestic front door in a narrow street in the Kent seaside town of Deal, a museum is celebrating two centuries of cinema – or, as the founders insist, 35,000 years.

“The history of cinema is the history of the moving image, and that goes back to flickering shadows on the walls of painted caves,” said Prof Joss Marsh, one of the co-founders.

Deal does not have a cinema but the hunger for the moving image is palpable. The museum’s exhibits include cameras, posters, props, original artwork, as well as moving images created by 200-year-old optical toys before film was invented. The museum is the creation of the renowned film archivist David Francis and his wife, Marsh, a historian of popular culture.

A collage of advertising and announcement slides displayed in a window. Photograph: Kent Museum of the Moving Image

The artefacts, acquired over a lifetime of collecting, borrowing and skip diving, include a priceless hoard of Ealing Studios posters salvaged on its way to the dump.

This is the third – and, he promises, final – film museum created by Francis, who was awarded an OBE in 1982. In the 1980s he was a lead member of the team behind the Museum of the Moving Image, part of the British Film Institute (BFI) complex on the South Bank in London, which opened in 1988 and closed for redevelopment in 1999.

That museum’s future has been mired in planning and funding disputes, and this year the BFI dropped plans to construct a £130m headquarters. Meanwhile, Francis moved to the US where he became archivist of the enormous film collection at the Library of Congress. The research institute, which began as a conservation store for the potentially explosive vintage film stock, is home to more than 6m items relating to the moving image.

Marsh and Francis met in the US and, after touring magic lantern shows and carrying crates of glass slides and a vintage projector in the back of their car, they moved to Kent, where Marsh had family connections.

The pair envisaged a quite life but instead they became visiting fellows at the University of Kent. Since then, they say, every spare minute of the past two years has been spent buying, building and populating the new museum, which occupies two floors of a small house.

David Francis, co-curator and film archivist, with strips for the museum’s demonstration zoetrope, a pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion. Photograph: Kent Museum of the Moving Image

Marsh and Francis are out of space but have continued to collect rare artefacts, with some items – including a billboard film poster – extending beyond the display cases and into the floor space.

For the museum’s opening, Marsh and Francis created a collage of film clips, including from FW Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu and Orson Welles smouldering in the 1949 film noir The Third Man.

An 1890s tri-unial (three lens) lantern by W Watson & Sons, on its original travelling trunk. The rare item is still in use at the museum. Photograph: Kent Museum of the Moving Image

They expected visitors would glance at it and move on to the main displays. Instead most were transfixed, so the pair have added a row of chairs and are looking for a suitable site nearby to convert into a cinema.

“We saw this as our retirement project – but now, you never know,” Francis said. “I’m afraid I am a serial retiree.”