time. An invisible voice can be «present» when it has been previously visible and the person speaking has merely left the visual frame or becomes invisible afterward. Actually, the cinematographic triumph of «acousmêtre» effect is essentially the effect caused by the uncanny voice that is simultaneously in and outside of the picture, meaning that it is ultimately neither in nor outside. «For its part, cinematographic acousmêtre is thus off outside of the image from the audience's standpoint, but at the same time it is in the image, from behind which it emerges, either in reality (in the classic cinema) or the imagination (in television or drive-in movies, etc.) As if the voice drifts around on the surface, inside and outside, simultaneously, without having a place to settle down.»[17]

Games of doubling

amour,» which features a 9double bind : consisting of a skeptical vocal authority and the visual authentification of the cruel nuclear catastrophe in Hiroshima: «tu n'as rien vue à Hiroshima, tu as tout inventé.» With these words, the visual impressions of the traumatic past (the Frenchwoman's love for a German soldier at the end of World War II, and her lover's unimaginable horror of the atom bomb explosion) are continually shaken, and yet at the same time, they prompt a dialectic between seeing and inventing. The stranger who came to be in a film about peace insisted upon seeing everything the photographs of the destroyed city, the newsreels of the burned and mutilated bodies. She was in the museum, with its documents, its reconstructions and explanations, all of the memorializing material that is also seen in the film. And nevertheless, another voice, from off-camera, repeats that nothing has been seen, everything has been invented. Whereupon the female voice begins to tell everything she knows about terror, in order to prove that she has not invented anything. This dilemma also defines the films of Chris Marker, who began as an assistant to Resnais and, to a certain extent, adopted the technique of editing with