The Cinematographic Innards of Joseph Heller´s “Catch-22”

Joseph Heller wrote a few quite cinematographic novels. His most famous one, Catch-22, has a discontinuous and non-chronological structure. In addition, it displays a lengthy string of events. All these traits stimulated the shot of two cinema versions and a script. While the novel is massive, the movie transcriptions retained the most spectacular scenes. The spectacle in the novel has a twofold nature: one highlights the absurdity of war and military camps; the other one stresses the brutality and cruelty of war. Oscillating between framing and montage, these intersemiotic translations of the novel capture the ineffable expressivity of a disturbing narration.