USA 1973/2008, directed by William Friedkin, with Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair, 134 minutes (Original version)

In a church, a statue of Mary is disfigured in an obscene way, and at the home of the actress Chris MacNeil strange things suddenly start to happen. The bed of Chris’ 12-year-old daughter Regan is shaken at night by invisible forces and Regan’s face distorts to a slime-spitting grimace. When medical examinations cannot find anything wrong, Chris asks two Jesuit priests to carry out an exorcism.

The American audience ran screaming from the movie, but the film broke almost all records. The Exorcist polarized the audience: was it a “very good B-movie,” as a critic once wrote in Tageszeitung, or does it deserve the label “especially worthy” that was given to it by the German film rating office? This institution saw the success of the “impressive cinema spectacle” among the spectators as the result of an underlying sense of insecurity. Social, political, and economic factors like Vietnam, Watergate, Hells Angels, and Charles Manson had made the US insecure. Friedkin was more interested in this aspect than the deeply Catholic metaphysical debate over good and evil that was the central focus of William Peter Blatty’s novel, according to this viewpoint.

But according to Thomas Willman, the newly introduced sequences of the so-called “director’s cut” from 2008 (marketed as the “version you haven’t seen before”) give us a new take on the film. “The conflict increasingly becomes one of (helpless) science and belief (to be found again). And evil becomes much more clearly atruly supernatural power from outside” (www. artchock.de). Thus, The Exorcist seems to again have become a film for the times, a mirror of the neoconservative state with Christian fundamentalist ambitions that can be seen in the US today.

Saturday | Jan. 17 | 10 pm

Lecture 8