Soundtrack of a film review about the coup (2024)

When you see the archive footage of Patrice Lumumba, which forms the backbone of the powerful documentary ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’, you witness a daring future that, due to the rot of colonialism, tragically never happened . The counterpart to the intrusive use of newsreels, fragments from biographies and political speeches is the kinetic use of jazz music.

For example, on October 28, 1960, Louis Armstrong arrived jubilantly in the Congolese capital Leopoldville (renamed Kinshasa in 1966) to perform. He came to a country that has always baffled the Eurocentric imagination as part of a US State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of Congo’s quest for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s actions, with the assassination of Lumumba, the dream had already died.

The compact, encyclopedic film ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez does more than just tell about the demise of a revolution, a revolution that created a pan-African movement consisting of a dozen countries that were independent from their colonial rulers. . It tells viewers how industrial countries, especially in the West, are still picking the bones of a broken promise decades later.

It is difficult to watch Grimonprez’s intuitive narrative of history without sensing the sinister truth of world history: the world’s great powers see countries like Congo only as an exploitable resource, not as a sovereign state. To tell this reality, Grimonprez follows a similar path followed by Raoul Peck, whose documentary ‘Lumumba: Death of a Prophet’ is an incredible portrait of a defiant man. Grimonprez delves into the enormous amount of available images and texts about Lumumba and that short period in which the idea of ​​a United States of Africa, as conceived by Marcus Garvey, tells how Congo gained its independence and lost Lumumba.

Nevertheless, Grimonprez’s film differs from Peck’s overview through its use of music. Like the improvisational spirit of jazz, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is not a linear film. It jumps and jumps from 1961 to contemporary ads for Tesla and Apple. The same can be said about the murderous list of jazz legends: Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach and Armstrong – who take center stage. Grimonprez is not very interested in laying the biographical foundations of these figures; they are iconic enough that their appearance gives the documentary an inherent atmosphere and presence. That built-in tenor is necessary in a film that requires a lot of reading, with excerpts from Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, and In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament (Bofane reads passages from his book that speak to the desire of world powers to gain control of the country’s uranium supply).

It is this last angle that forms the central thesis of the film. True independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers fearful of relinquishing the unchecked wealth they had acquired through ultra-violent oppression. Grimonprez sees Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1956 British nationalization of the Suez Canal as a potential parallel for the kind of natural resource recovery that other African countries such as Congo would have sought. Nasser is just one of many predictions that Grimonprez bridges as he paints a comprehensive picture to demonstrate how world powers used Cold War fears to justify assassinations and coups.

The film explores the burgeoning rebellion of these newly independent countries from many angles. For example, Malcolm And even before she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol, Andrée Blouin, whose home videos and book “My Country, Africa” ​​are mentioned in the film, mobilized African women for political change. As the film shows us, this sense of collective mobilization made world powers even more afraid.

That fear, the film argues, is why music, and jazz in particular, became a conduit for political purposes. Grimonprez can wink, especially when he introduces the Cabinet of Jazz; he and editor Rik Chaubet can also be spontaneous, weaving each performance into a narrativization of history that is often reminiscent of a late-night set list. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Lullaby of the Leaves,” for example, becomes a playful way to imagine Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the U.S. to meet President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a meeting between two kindred spirits. On the other hand, Nina Simone’s visit to Nigeria in 1961 on behalf of the American Society of African Culture, a group whose connection to the CIA Simone was unaware of, demonstrates the underhanded ways in which these artists confronted regimes they supported by menacing imperialists.

Even if “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” which runs a whopping 150 minutes, struggles to maintain a snappy rhythm, this documentary has a captivating audacity. This film forces its audience to take in every note, clip, and quote that crams a whole study of information into an elegant, slick package. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, reviving the spirit of Lumumba by expressing the same kind of defiance that the political leader embraced.