Edited into the timeframe of a single minute, and filmed in London’s Mile End Road,
Martin Doyle and Guy Sherwin’s Mile End Purgatorio, from 1991, explores the associative rhythmic and visual interplay between language and image. Sherwin’s imagery at times echoes the precise cadences of Doyle’s narrated text. A fast paced opening montage of street signs and numbers is followed by camera enaction of a text reference to ‘turning around’, with rapid zooms altering the meaning of signage: ‘me’ becomes ‘men’ becomes ‘menu’. Reflections; the promotional pictures from a gent’s hairstylists; pub, takeaway and estate agent frontage synaesthesically augment aural input, ending with a sustained shot on ‘double happiness’.