With an amusing sense of drama, The Houses That Are Left illustrates Silver’s technique of building an obscure narrative into a complex net of miscellaneous texts and images. Unfolding throughout the tape is the story of two friends who come together to try to figure out how to live in the modern world while being besieged by militant messages from the dead. Juxtaposing black and white film with color video and fusing narrative elements of drama, comedy, and documentary, Silver provides a structure that allows a plurality of voices to speak: two women who were childhood friends, people on the street interviewed for “market research,” and the observations of dead people who watch the living on television monitors.