Clark Art Screens 'The Exorcist'

08:00AM / Thursday, January 09, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Thursday, Jan. 16, the Clark Art Institute screens the latest installment in its Hollywood Auteurs film series, "The Exorcist" (1973), at 6 pm.

Presented in partnership with Images Cinema, this series captures the explosion of creativity, critical acclaim, and box office success that Hollywood directors found after the fall of the studio system. This film is shown in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release:

One of the most frightening films ever made and banned from video release in Britain for over ten years, "The Exorcist" is the story of an atheist actress who turns to two Jesuit priests to free her twelve-year-old daughter from what she has come to believe is demonic possession. Written by a devout Catholic intellectual, William Blatty, it is an unsettling combination of honest belief in evil and film as storytelling. Director William Friedkin took strident, dictatorial measures to maintain a pervasive feeling of fear on the set, at times refrigerating it to just above freezing. (Run time: 2 hours, 2 minutes)

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.

Tags: Clark Art,

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Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

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