Without backstage, there is no theater. Following this implicit rule, cinema shapes its theatrical fictions, where what happens behind the scenes and offstage plays at least as significant a role as the stage itself. What cinema seeks and finds behind the scenes, which narratives it associates with a visit to the backstage, and which spatial and visual orders come into play are some of the questions that arise from the film career of the backstage. Between stage entrances and dressing room doors, boundaries and crossings, fabricated insights, exclusions, passages, traverses, and seemingly exclusive accesses, the contours of an intermedial negotiation become apparent, shifting from the realm of text to that of the screen.