unrooted narrative. An overly extravagant desire to narrate is practically a trademark of Marker's abstract cinematographic artworks, which have been called essay films. Regardless of the subject matter, Marker's storehouse of images produces a new cosmos of over determined meanings. In this sense, the filmmaker's game with the documentary film genre becomes more of an ironic analysis of the documentary's latent tendencies to monumentalize. Once again, for emphasis: the intent is to fabricate a minor monumentality, which, in a narrative shape, provides food for thought. It is more like a kind of evolution than a lofty subliminity, like folding Japanese origami paper, or new digital photo processes, such as the zapping, windowing, linking, and morphing that actually dominate Marker's more recent works («Zapping Zone» 1990, F; «Level 5» 1997, F; «Immemory» 1997, F).[3] Nevertheless, in analyzing the potential of this new narrativity in film, the image is again and again considered to be the most important aspect. Even though in Le regard et la voix, Pascal Bonitzer referred to the off-camera voice as a symbol of the function of power, he still maintains that the attention of the

scriptwriter is solely focused on the images. «It is therefore not simply about being able to tell a story, but being able to tell the story in view of the images, under the dictates of the images & the image tells the story.»[4] Chris Marker himself is often quoted with a remark from «Sans soleil», made by the character of Yamaneko, the computer expert: images simply want to be what they are, «that is, pictures.» One can almost hear a continuance of the prejudice deeply rooted in the old paragone between the written and visual arts, which recalls the early days of the transition from silent to sound film, when it was feared that sound would detract from the intensity of visual expression.[5] Yet in no other cineaste's work does the voice indeed, language itself play such an important role as it does in Chris Marker's films. However, the soundtrack follows its own laws of editing, which do not simply correspond to the visual mise-enscène. In Marker's work, there is almost no synchronized original soundtrack; everything is owed to post-production processing of both visuals and sound, where the narrator tells the story in a practically two-handed, asynchronous way. Because unity, the camera, and the