with images of the exploding bombs as seen from the perspective of the attackers), disconnection of the vocal from the visual, as if the film were concerned with connecting the utopian promise of happiness to the iconoclastic condition of its acousmatic withdrawal (as in the beginning of «Sans soleil», where a randomly edited series of images alternates with a black screen, accompanied by a voice speaking about witnessing happiness a technique that Wim Wenders also uses in the beginning of Tokyo-Ga, where he deals with the theme of memory), showing what is being spoken visually postpones the fulfillment of speech: as in the profane continuation of a kind of theology consisting of a process of Adamic naming, when the next image is introduced with the words «I show you &» and then a name is heard, identifying an object (for instance, a river). Irony might also be included here sometimes and is expressed, for example, in «Lettre de sibérie» in the eulogy to the raindeer (renne), which is combined with images of the rue de Rennes Parisian Métro station. It also appears when the directional voice of the computer in «Level Fives» takes the hermeneutic initiative and figures out the mysterious program for

the battle of Okinawa with «editing ace» Chris, whose voice can only be heard off-camera and which undergoes a strong désacousmatisation when presented as the face of the woman who stands astonished in front of the man and the machine. Who, then, is speaking? Is it always the work? But who makes the work speak? Who is the ubiquitous acousmatic ventriloquist? To form a hypothesis, the question is asked: does perhaps the entire presentation of the phantom known as Chris Marker[19] owe all to the effect of acousmêtre caused by the presence of the artist as an acousmatic (neither visualized nor embodied) voice?

Word and image