My paper focuses on Walt Benjamin's notion of "threshold" which is scattered amongst different writings. We can find traces of it in the Arcades project, in his Berlin childhood around 1900, in the Artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction, or even about surrealism. Nonetheless there is no clear definition of it and we can better understand the notion by both connecting its appearances, and illustrating it with elements of the visual culture it seems tied to. Indeed, the threshold features strong aspects of a spectacular culture in transition. For Benjamin the cinema plays an important part in breaking the ancient and bourgeois artworks's mode of reception, and to demonstrate the new mode the film is related to Benjamin compares it with the new architecture. Therefore his media theory bears considerations on space which I'd like to link to the "threshold", which is not a limit nor a frontier but a zone, a space where contradictions meet themselves.To do so I'll focus both on the visual culture and media archaeology of the nineteenth century and I'll try to delineate key aspects to consider film theory beyond that period.