Red Army Friction

'Red Army Friction' consisted of one week of film programmes at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, presenting a season of films about the Red Army, and an associated programme of talks/discussion panels.

The commission to curate a week-long film programme and series of talks/discussion panels marked the ICA’s revisiting of the deaths of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe in Satammheim high security prison in 1977. The defining theme was that of the conflict between state power and resistance.

The research referred back to a long-held interest in the German protest movement of the late 1960s associated with the Baader–Meinhof group, including information which contradicts its negative media coverage, and the recasting of history as it appears in films made from the 1970s to 2001. Another aspect of the research was the selection of films including Christopher Roth’s ‘Baader’ (2001) and Andres Veile’s documentary ‘Black Box Germany’ which together reflected the many facets of activism at this time.

Fried also negotiated with a number of those involved with the activists at the time to participate in the talks/discussion panels. These included one of the key surviving members of the group, Astrid Proll, whose photographs were shown on a continuous loop throughout the event.

Others taking part included film-makers Ken McMullen, Gerdt Conradt, Victoria Mapplebeck and Ben Lewis, the activist and commentator Tariq Ali, and Gerhard Wilke who spoke on how phenomena like terrorism relate to the trauma deep within the collective memory of German society.