One might think of Tacita Dean’s film installation Boots, 2003, as a ghost story: It is set in a sort of haunted house (perhaps explaining the work’s location at RIBA), a vast and immaculate—though entirely empty and unfurnished—Art Deco villa situated amid splendid gardens. One hears strange footsteps (the sound of a dapper gent walking with the aid of two canes) echoing through the vacant halls and corridors. He speaks—languidly, ramblingly—but to whom?

The fiction that the camera is invisible seems to reign here, as in classic cinema. There is no off-camera interlocutor,

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the whole thing was bonkers. You could enter through a door but were strongly advised to climb a ladder—the first of many—to reach a crawl space. Once inside there were rooms on stilts, walkways, scaffolds, spaces built from cinder blocks, straw bales, wood, and tinfoil, and more tunnels to crawl through and ladders to climb. You could not explore this environment without at some point getting down on hands and knees or hiking up your skirt to clamber more easily from one level to another. Its title was “Klütterkammer,” a regional word referring