Polish Liminal Documentary By Don Fredericksen Among the notions
through which one might view Poland’s history and culture,
liminality provides a most potent lens. Derived from the Latin
“limen,” meaning doorway or threshold, liminality gives name to
situations or structures that are in some way “betwixt and
between.” Anthropological studies of rites of passage name as
liminal the times and spaces when one has left a previous
identity but has not yet acquired a new one. Psychological
studies of the hypnogogic state, and depth psychology’s
attention to the threshold between the conscious and unconscious
registers of the mind are each, in their separate manner,
focused upon the presence of a limen, and the experience of
liminality—of being at, or in, a threshold. Poland’s liminality
is fundamentally geographic, a fact from which much of its
history and culture grows, as evidenced by its disappearance
during the 1795 to 1918 partitions, the legacy of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop treaty, and the 1944 to 1989 period of