Starring: Raimund Harmstorf, Amadeus August, Gianni Macchia

Rolf Olsen’s Bloody Friday (1972) is one of the more underrated examples of West German crime cinema. The film opens with an explosive courtroom escape by convicted criminal Heinz (Raimund Harmstorf) and doesn’t let up from there: Heinz and his friends plan a bank robbery to break free of their repressive daily lives. The heist becomes predictably violent, with the police viewing them as leftist terrorists, and things go from bad to worse when the group begins to turn on one another. With uncredited script work from poliziotteschi master Fernando Di Leo, Bloody Friday straddles the line between gritty exploitation film and political arthouse movie. Though director Rolf Olsen was primarily known for a series of low budget exploitation films and mondo movies, Bloody Friday has themes similar to a lot of the more consciously political New German Cinema crime films from directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Reinhard Hauff.

Bloody Friday screens in connection with the release of Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 from writers and editors Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan, with an introduction from Samm Deighan, who will have copies of the book for sale.