What often gets mistaken for liminality is more accurately kenopsia, or the eerie atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned. Liminal spaces, meanwhile, are no-places, or between places, transitory stations. While the two are not entirely unrelated, and one may even act to enhance the feeling of the other, there are essential differences.
Wim Wenders’ 1984 masterpiece, Paris, Texas, is concerned with the liminal. Its opening shots are of the Chihuahuan Desert as the camera drifts through the Agua Fria Mountains. Jagged red peaks jut out of a dry arroyo. Their slopes are piled with loose rock and sand, ready to be washed into the Rio Grande the next time a desert storm rolls through west Texas. Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson is picking his way through this landscape. This desert is not kenopsic; it has never been bustling with people. Kenopsia is detained, most often, to human constructions. The landscape we are presented with in Paris, Texas, is anything but. It results from long-dead volcanoes and pitiless floods, sun-scorched, wind-beaten, and hopelessly ancient.