The archival footage of Patrice Lumumba that forms the spine of the violently outspoken documentary ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d Etat’ suffers from such rot and offsets the future that was bearing the ambitious promise of never coming into existence. A great foil to the movie’s cutting use of a collage of newsreels, excerpts from the biographers, and political speeches is jazz music. For example Armstrong Amusing History On October 28, 1960, he went to Leopoldville which was later, in 1966, to be called Kinshasa, and he did so during one of his world tours.
To begin with, he was shown to be part of a Jam Session in the United States State Department-sponsored reforms. The Euro-centric gaze forever is baffled by the mystique of dusty African beauty. Smarting from the loss of nearly all of its empires, the European powers were glaringly exhausted by the loss. In the months preceding his performance insecurity blossomed and so did the cries for independence and on January 1st Republic of Congo was born. To add insult to injury, Lumumba was assassinated and that cut short the dream of a true Africa.
In essence, it’s a fresh and novel perspective of the old and true narrative that the elite around the world are still feasting off of an old empty promise. Inexplicably, Grimonprez is an imperious Belgian director, who blatantly lays out the plans of a capitalist’s dream, revolutions of lavish idols residing within their colonies. It goes without saying and is fairly easy to parable the evolving mess and the ominous zeppelin.
To narrate this story, Grimonprez follows Raoul Peck’s footsteps and starts from where he left off with his documentary Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. In a Turner-esque fashion, he explores the vast constellation of books and films made on Lumumba, as well as Marcos Garvey’s envisioned United States of Africa, in an attempt to link how Congo fought for its independence and lost a part of Lumumba in the process.
Notwithstanding, the musical element is what sets Grimonprez’s film apart from Peck’s. Just like Jazz music’s free-flowing nature, Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat does not follow a sequential format as a movie. Rather, it shifts between 1961 and modern-day advertisements of Apple, Tesla, and other such companies. Being part of the Jazz movement, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Armstrong are also quite the heavy hitters when it comes to being focal points of the film. Like most casual viewers, Grimonprez is not too rooted in the biographies of the people featured in the film, their positions alone are sufficient to set the mood and atmosphere of the documentary.
This tenor is particularly important when the film includes parts of Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, or indeed Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament (When Bofane reads from his book where portions of it concern the desire of world powers to control the uranium resources of the country).
It’s this latter angle that constitutes the kernel of the film. True independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers that got apprehensive about losing the unbridled riches they acquired by brutally oppressing the people of the countries they colonized. What Grimonprez actually does is envisage Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal from British control as a possible example of resource reclamation that other African nations such as Congo would have advocated for. The film also exhibits how the assassination of Patrice Lumumba is in phase with Nassi’s overall geographical continuum of political violence. With regard to claiming new territories, Nasser is just one of the many predictions Grimonprez bridges with.
Many such countries recently gained independence and share a similar fight against imperialism. For example, the case of Malcolm X in the film shows that Asian and African Nations held significant authority in the United Nations Organization. With their power bloc, African countries could easily bar the US, Belgium, or Great Britain. Even before she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol, Andrée Blouin, whose home movies and book My Country, Africa are referenced in the film, rallied African women for political awareness.
Judging by the events of the film, it can be reasonably assumed that such popular mobilization sent shivers down the spines of world powers.
The film argues that particular anxiety is the reason why music, and jazz in particular, became political. Grimonprez sometimes bears a twinkle in his eye as he unveils the Cabinet of Jazz; he and editor Rik Chauvet are also occasionally rather incautious, moving in and out of a performance and transforming it into a historical narrative that sounds like the set list for a late-night gig more often than not. For example, Ella Fitzgerald: The Lullaby of the Leaves has been interpreted in a frivolous way to suggest that Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States to see President Dwight D. Eisenhower was more or less a meeting of two lovers. Nina Simone’s trip to Nigeria in 1961 as a representative of the American Society of African Culture whose ties with the CIA were unknown to Simone shows that these artists were used against the regimes they supported by the nasty imperialists.
In “Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat” a movie of almost 150 minutes, this documentary has refreshing audacity and still manages to weave in and out of a reasonable rhythm at times.
In this film, every note, clip, and quotation is appended. The entire film turns into an information study crammed into a very smooth notch. The movie ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’, finely manages to portray a strong sense of longing and revival, as it gives life to Lumumba’s essence while also wearing the same strong sense of resilience the political leader had.
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