voice-overs, acousmêtre. At any rate, his films rarely feature the désacousmatisation of speech. They narrate a great deal and stage very little (in the sense of being an incarnation of vocal authority). The soundtrack consciously functions with the double effect of acousmêtre, which is always in- and outside, or, more precisely, everywhere (whereas in French, doubler can also mean to use a voice-over to synchronize something that confirms the voice as a mere double, as a doppelgänger, or the undead returned). From a historical perspective, Marker is also quoted as the representative of an esthetic position that reaches from Mallarmé and Giraudoux to Blanchot and beyond. Its most important principle is that the work should speak, not the artist. Hence Marker's multilayered doubling games he is not just the author of the works, but the author in the work, the auctorial absence in the presence of other off-camera voices speaking in the names of yet others from the artificial voices appearing in the shape of Hayao Yamaneko's synthesizer in «Sans soleil» to the computerized voice in «Level Five.» For Marker, the problem of authorship in general crystallizes in the acousmatic phenomenon

of film. Authorship per se already opens up a highly dialectic game between presence in absence and absence in presence. In the essay film, an acousmatic voice meaning, one that comments but cannot be visually identified only seems to speak in the name of the author. It can be feminine, as it is in «Sans Soleil», or, as in the synchronized German version, a masculine-sounding female voice; perhaps it is the cameraman's voice, represented in partial quotations from fictitious letters written in the first person. Whereby some statements might come from the treasury of quotations culled from Marker's favorite poets (especially Giraudoux and Michaud), such as Michaux's exordium, «Je vous j'écris d'un Pays Lointain,» featured in «Lettre de sibérie.»[18] Acousmatic effects Altogether, however, roughly three kinds of acousmatic effects can be distinguished in Marker's films: - dissymmetry between voice and image, wherein what is shown is not an incarnation (in the désacusmatic sense) or, as such, functions only in an ironic or cynical sense (like the radio reports from the bomber pilots at the beginning of «Le fond de l'air est rouge,» where the electronically distorted voices are edited together