Traveling throughout the Great Plains of the Northern Prairie, one is immersed in a vast oceanic landscape that is punctuated by small islands of population. The immensity of the prairie sits in stark contrast to the scale of its small towns. Yet within the set of symbols that constitutes the main street,  the little theater offers within its confines an intimate experience of the imagination: a landscape as limitless as the plains.

The small rural communities of the high-grass prairie have undergone significant economic and cultural change in the last thirty years.  This change is evident in the retail displacement of the town's Main Street removed to the ubiquitous regional shopping mall and with it the community's public realm.  The small percentage of rural towns that have managed to sustain an integrated sense of community have one similarity; the local movie theater with on-going community support. 

The rural movie theater and its role in the community's 'sense of place' are the subject of this research in the cultural landscape history of the upper prairie.  These small movie houses have been the main secular meeting place for all social strata of the community. As a symbol it is comparable to the role of the small rural church in how it acts as an architectural vessel of civic fellowship.  The set of icons the theater presents begins on the street and culminates on the blank screen which is itself a dynamic container of  didactic symbols. 

Where entropy has eroded the village marketplace,the local Movie Theater in this study has delivered the communal 'sense of place' from one generation to the next.  The vision that these theaters give of the interdependency of the economic and cultural factors for a small community outlines their future survival in the prairie landscape. 

As its citizens will attest, there are advantages and disadvantages to living in such isolated rural communities.  While solidarity is strong, isolation can also create a dysfunctional insularity that brings out unhealthy communal attributes.  The consequences of inertia can lead to economic and social losses that threaten the community's stability. The critical infusion of new ideas and information into small town life has a long history in the social life of American small towns from Chautauquas to local cinemas. 

Several of the case studies researched have been purchased and operated on a grass-roots level by individuals or civic groups that prize their local movie theater for its social function and its vitality as a historic symbol for the stability and preservation of the downtown. These small rural movie theaters reveal themselves to be the storehouse of the village's collective memory. 

This study, which comes under the categories of Cultural Landscape Studies and Historic Preservation, contains twenty-seven working cinemas and two non- working theaters from different small towns in  North Dakota. The purpose of the research is to portray the dynamic cultural process of the region's identity.