enthusiastic commentary on Marker's film «Lettre de sibérie» the latter position is basically represented by Serge Daney, who, however, did not deal with Marker's films. As Barthes' and Marker's similar definitions emphasized, acknowledging the opposition of the independent image and sound editing, as well as the way the view and the voice are organized, serves to liberate the visual narrative, which should no longer be used to illustrate or imagine solely linguistic semantics. Conversely, the text must no longer expose the truth of the images, but instead, can devote itself with iconic detachment to the chronology of events in the universe of discourse, just as the visual track merely delivers images that simply want to be what they are, to wit: images. Marker allows the pictura to have a referential dialectic with other absent images in order to use the written image to develop a new way of reading things, an analytical reading of the visual, which at the same time includes its inverse or the abyss of illusion, memory, or knowledge. Since his early film works, Marker has been revealing this dialectic of images through the double representational function of sound and screen image. «Lettre de Sibérie» earned

emphatic praise from André Bazin, who spoke of a fundamental renewal of the relationship between word, image, and dialectic of a new kind of «horizontal» editing, based on recurring voices instead of a linear series of images.[20] Bazin was also the first to make the street scene in Irkutsk famous; in this scene, Marker had the brilliant idea of repeating a three-part series of scenes: a street in which a bus and a limousine meet, construction workers smoothing a road surface, an inhabitant of the city crossing the landscape. Each scene was repeated with different accompanying commentary: first procommunist propaganda, then cynical defeatism, and finally, sobering facts. [fig. 5 from C. Marker's «Lettre de Sibérie» taken from A propos du CD-ROM Immemory, Paris 1997, p. 20] At the same time, Bazin attempts to subordinate the image's power of expression to the voice. He conjures up an «intelligence» whose «direct expression» is also «the word,» so that the series of images is dependent upon this «verbal intelligence,» as if it were a Hegelist absoluter Geist containing the dialectic trinity of the images' statement. However, what Marker persuasively elucidates is something,