This thesis explores rural Welsh cinema history, in terms of both exhibition practice and audience experience, prior to 1970. In doing so it provides new contexts for the burgeoning, though still underrepresented, field of rural cinema studies. In considering rural regions of Wales, this thesis also seeks to overturn a dominance of urban studies within the limited amount of scholarship concerning Welsh cinema history.

Utilising a combination of archival and ethnographic methodologies, this thesis then asks what were the unique factors of rural Welsh cinemagoing and exhibition history. Furthermore, this thesis rejects any view of rural Wales as a culturally homogeneous zone and considers if these experiences and practices vary across the differing social, political, economic and linguistic regions of the country.