Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat— Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracking the events leading up to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba that’s comprised entirely of archival footage and audio and text excerpts from a wide range of sources and first-hand accounts— opens at the close. Text rippling across the screen illustrate the dialogue between musician Abbey Lincoln, civil rights activist Lewis Michaux, and others as reported by Maya Angelou in her autobiography about this time period, The Heart of a Woman. Lincoln, jazz drummer Max Roach, and others ultimately crashed a meeting of the UN Security Council protesting Lumumba’s murder and the United Kingdom, United States, and Belgium’s involvement in it. Grimonprez spends the subsequent two and a half hours unpacking the collision of Cold War politics, espionage, and colonialism that led to this incident— and its ramifications, which continue to ripple across the world to this day— in immense detail.
And then there’s the music. Jazz is every bit as integral to this story, unexpected as that may seem. Six months prior to Lumumba’s assassination, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly the Belgium Congo) and 15 other newly independent African nations were admitted to the United Nations. Banded together, they had the power to outvote the old colonial powers. The U.S. State Department, in response, sends jazz icon Louis Armstrong and his band to the Congo as a jazz ambassador, an outward gesture of camaraderie and goodwill that is actuality was a calculated smokescreen engineered to mask America’s (and the other aforementioned countries) efforts to oust the pan-Africanist Lumumba and maintain control over Congo’s vast uranium supplies. The music of Armstrong and many of his contemporaries— including Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Miriam Makeba, Charles Mingus, and others— exists as more than a plot element here (as when Armstrong’s concert in the Congolese province of Katanga is used as a cover for the CIA to transport large quantities of nearby uranium to the U.S. before the Soviet Union finds out). Grimonprez underscores his entire film with a jazz soundtrack, the rhythms of the music shifting in time with the rhythms of the movie, which— despite how dense and well-researched it is— possesses an improvisational feel not unlike that style of music in the way it hops around from character to character and incident to incident (much of that can be credited to Rik Chaubet’s snappy editing). Grimonprez frequently segues from political machinations to archival footage of the musicians performing, but these breaks aren’t exactly interludes; rather, they exist in conversation with the material that surrounds them. Simone’s cover of “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”— Bob Dylan’s folk song about a desperate and impoverished farmer— accompanies Andrée Blouin’s account of attacks from political opponents, and Simone’s own experience with being used as an unwitting CIA cover. The lyrics of Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black & Blue?” ring with a particular potency given the context:
“How would it end? Ain’t got a friend
My only sin is in my skin
What did I do to be so black and blue?”
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat makes use of other key texts as well, including “My Country, Africa” by activist and Lumumba’s chief of protocol Blouin, “To Katanga and Back” by Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Congo Inc.” by Congolese novelist In Koli Jean Bofane, and audio memoirs by Soviet communist chairman Nikita Khrushchev. The latter’s role in this affair is particularly reframed contrary to public perception, the seemingly buffoonish act of angrily smacking his shoe on the table at a meeting of the UN General Assembly masking his efforts to coerce other countries into denouncing colonization. Numerous other sources— articles, reports, broadcasts and the like— are cited with text on screen, but this is no dry video essay. Just look to some of its playful touches (running down the musicians as a political cabinet, for one) and the undeniable style of the vibrant graphics. Talking heads are kept to a minimum, although there are a few new interviews with those involved in clandestine operations— like Daphne Park, a British intelligence agent who served in the Congo. Archival interviews with the likes of activist Malcolm X, CIA director Allen Dulles, and painter René Magritte round out the cast. The sheer scope of the information presented makes me question how well the film will play to a general audience. And yet, when locked in, it’s riveting, a challenging and compelling political thriller focused on an overlooked page of history, and an exposé of the pervasive destruction whiteness has wrought on the world. It’s more than colonizers moving in on Black nations for their own gains; it’s using Black art and artists as unknowing pawns in their scheme. Art institutions are tied to these acts of espionage in other ways as well; the Museum of Modern Art, as seen in the film, was a hotbed for CIA activity. How then, can these spaces intended for learning and creativity truly represent people and their culture? Grimonprez, a Belgian filmmaker, is clearly intent on reckoning with his country’s dark past, unveiling atrocities that have hitherto been danced around in conversation. But the ties to America’s racial unrest are prevalent as well; Armstrong refused to play for segregated audiences in South Africa, and canceled his tour to Russia on behalf of the U.S. after the National Guard was sent to Little Rock, Arkansas to prevent Black students from entering a white school, dropping his normally huge smile and easygoing attitude to say, “The government can go to hell.” Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a film about politics and music and history, but it unravels that history with such a vibrating aliveness that the simple fact of its existence becomes a radical political act in and of itself.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is now playing in select theaters, and screens locally at the Arkadin Cinema and Bar on November 16. Runtime: 150 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 