Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Monday March 10

Preceeded by Performance by Brooks Jazz Vocal Ensemble @ 6:30 pm

Film @ 7 pm

2 hr 30 min
Documentary
Not Rated
Released 2024

Juxtaposing the story of the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba with a musical tour of jazzman Louis Armstrong and with the expansion of the United Nations after the independence of many African countries in the 1960s might be tall order. Trickier still would be telling this complex story, full of many characters and plot swerves, in a nonlinear manner while filling the screen with written clues providing context like a bibliography of an academic thesis. Writer and director Johan Grimonprez sets himself a difficult task with Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, yet accomplishes it with astonishing success. The film plays like both a dense historical text and a lively jazz concert while proving itself to be an invigorating piece of documentary filmmaking.

The film is like a most dramatic history lesson, full of theatrics, heightened emotions and vivid characters. This is politics presented as grand spectacle and ironic comedy: an original treatment of how a young popular African leader was assassinated in a coup d’etat so that colonial powers can keep profiting from his country’s mineral wealth. All of this plays to the rhythm of American jazz music of the time, to emphasize how the State Department used Armstrong and other Black musicians to deflect from Lumumba’s murder by sending them on a tour of African nations as goodwill ambassadors.

The film examines the burgeoning rebellion by these newly independent countries from many angles. For instance, through the analysis of Malcolm X, we find that Asian and African countries possessed outsized power in the UN, whereby anytime they stuck together as a coalition, they could vote down countries like the United States, Belgium, or Britain. And even before she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol, Andrée Blouin, whose home movies and book My Country, Africa are referenced in the film, mobilized African women for political change. As the film informs us, this sense of collective mobilization further frightened world powers.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat might sound overwhelming or too academic, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s an entertaining and instructive documentary that presents a huge canvas on which it masterfully explains a complicated historical moment. The film pushes its audience to absorb every note, clip, and quote that crams an entire study of information into an elegant, slick package. It succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, giving breath to Lumumba’s spirit by sporting the same kind of defiance the political leader espoused.