Director: Johan Grimonprez
Culled entirely – and exhaustingly – from archival footage and backed by some of the finest jazz music ever created, Johan Grimonprez here presents something wildly ambitious and intimidatingly dense; an in-depth and heavily contextualised account of the U.N.’s interference and culpability in the usurping of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba’s authority in the immediate aftermath of the country’s 1960 emancipation from colonialist control. That’s one of the heaviest, lengthiest sentences I’ve allowed to parse on here in a while (and not one without competition), but that’s entirely fitting for a run-on documentary that this one.
Coming in at a mildly-intimidating 150 minutes, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a feat of researching and editing. Imagined from a distance one pictures Grimonprez and his team with one of those huge cork boards you so often see in police procedurals, spindles of red string wound around drawing pins, connecting the dots, criss-crossing like some ungodly spider’s web. That’s the feel here. The resulting document is the product of obsession and who knows how many man-hours lost to pouring over biographies, transcripts, essays and newspaper articles in search of some definitive truth.
The effort taken is made evident in the presentation. Eschewing talking heads or any kind of condensing narration, Grimonprez instead favours an almost-continuous stream of on-screen text and accompanying footnotes citing sources. It’s a dizzying amount of information to take in, not least because the Belgian filmmaker seems keen to include as many supporting players as possible, digressing to address any minor character’s involvement in what can feel like efforts to make Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s underlying narrative more labyrinthine than it necessarily needs to be.
This might all be unpalatably dry were it not for the contextualising music that draws all of these threads together and affords the viewer a complimentary soundtrack that is second to none. It’s almost distracting in and of itself. Grimonprez busies you with names and dates while in your ear the likes of Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Louis Armstrong or Archie Shepp are drawing heaven from their instruments. Or, alternatively, expressing a stirring pain that compliments the sense of injustice slowly building in Grimonprez’s steely act of accusation. That it is the most invigorating Black music of its time is entirely on-point as the underlying racial paranoia between nations becomes a focal motivation for the drama unfolding.
In 1960 a record number of African nations attained independence and joined the U.N., each one of them garnering a vote that levelled the playing field with the pre-existing titanic superpowers of east and west. Footage of Soviet powerhouse Nikita Khrushchev beating his fists emphatically or waxing lyrical effectively express the man’s largess, but the threat of emerging clusters of unallied African countries is proffered as the impetus for a reactionary plot within the organisation to undermine the influence of countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État acknowledges that it is Belgium – the colonising country that had barely relinquished control of the DR Congo – that emerged as Lumumba’s fiercest enemy. That all of this comes from a Belgian filmmaker feels like a direct call for accountability. It is the fieriest kind of patriotism; the kind that demands a higher standard and justice for wrongs that can no longer hide behind hypocrisy.
Another pertinent message that Soundtrack conveys through example appears in the footage from US cities where the misdeeds against Lumumba became rallying cries for the uprising civil rights movement. Malcolm X is a frequent guest star on the fringes of this narrative, and his keen geopolitical mindset instilled in his followers a greater sense of understanding of global matters directly or indirectly effecting them. Inspiration through outrage and education. It can’t help but underscore how compartmentalised the world can feel today, where the problems of other countries overseas are often hushed out of conversation, or fall on deaf ears. Have we become too inured or complacent? Do we need new voices, new Malcolm Xs, to shake us from our torpor?
This is a long but compelling assemblage from Grimonprez. It can feel like you’re being buffeted with too much information at times, and the pertinent details can be lost in the chaos, but even on the occasions where that is so, the music is a breathtaking balm to behold, and there’s enough rigorous re-contextualising to allow one the chance to get back on track. Like many of the more powerful musical numbers that act as counterpoint, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État swells to a dramatic and emotional crescendo that demands a response from the audience. If a round of applause isn’t appropriate, a sharp, reverent intake of breath might do it.
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