These days, it seems nothing could be easier than making a political-historical documentary using archival footage—a precocious tenth-grader interested in, say, the Freedom Riders, could trawl the web for free clips and audio and assemble a feature on her laptop.
These kinds of documentaries are certainly thick on the ground now, streaming by the score on every platform; some are worthwhile, most not quite. As with most things, mediocrity fills the amphitheater while the occasional firebrand grabs you by the forehead.
Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is one of the latter. It is a restless, sprawling, meticulously researched piece of twentieth-century reiteration-excavation that, amid the hundred other things it accomplishes, paints an acidic portrait of how geopolitics, American and otherwise, are actually performed in the modern age.
That is: covertly, mercenarily, and lethally.
A Belgian filmmaker often casting a gimlet eye on political malfeasance and image culture, Grimonprez focuses here on the decolonization of Africa in the aftermath of World War II. Of specific concern is the fate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its newly elected and soon-to-be murdered prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. The film is a maddening saga, but, from top to bottom, it frames up the step-by-step post-colonial and neo-colonial skullduggery with the music and personalities of the day.
This includes preeminent black jazz artists, some of whom (Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone) were sent on African junkets unknowingly arranged by the CIA, while others (Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington) recorded songs expressing public solidarity with African peoples’ struggles. The film’s trigger and climax, in fact, is jazz greats Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s crash into the U.N. Security Council in 1961 to protest Lumumba’s U.S.-supported assassination. This shocking altercation, caught on film and featured in Grimonprez’s epic, was followed by massive protests all over the globe.
The film’s buoyant jazz-first strategy manages to make this death-march history lesson go down like strong beer. Grimonprez's juxtaposition of smooth jazz and violent conflict aptly complement the duality of a period defined by law and order on the surface and violent subversion in the background, while also being generously Black-forward.
Meanwhile, the two-and-one-half-hour-long film’s canvas is super-wide. It seems everyone who was anyone in 1960 had something to do or say about the Congo and its valuable uranium mines: Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev (whose several U.N. speeches crucify American hypocrisy for interference in Africa and for the Jim Crow South), Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, Zhou Enlai, Sukarno, Dag Hammarskjöld, Lumumba’s glamorous aide de camp Andree Blouin (whose memoir provides the film with huge swatches of narration), Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Dulles brothers, and Irish diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien (another memoir-narration source). And so on.
The cyclone of film clips takes great free-associative liberties in the sardonic tradition of filmmaker and activist Michael Moore and radical avant-gardist Craig Baldwin. But as it cuts from footage of cavorting Congolese schoolchildren and helicoptered elephants to speeches at the United Nations to an Art Blakely drum solo, Grimonprez keeps the narrative focus on how the election of the uncooperative and freedom-fighting Lumumba triggered panic among Western powers (whose lust for uranium doomed both his proposition for a “United States of Africa” and the potential Cold War non-alignment of African nations). The film delivers granular doses of forgotten badassery: how the Belgian government immediately subverted Lumumba’s administration (he held onto his seat for a total of three months) and sent its army to occupy the resource-rich south of the country, and how obedient Congolese goons (including Mobuto Sese Seko) were maneuvered into place to seize power.
The details, even the purely rhetorical ones, are stupefying. In one captivating scene, Lumumba proclaims to his parliament (many of whose members had been bought off by the CIA) that the meddling of the United Nations is “a reconquest!” In another scene, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) president and CIA veteran William Burden, who is both an owner of Congolese mines and the appointed ambassador to Brussels, calls the killing of Lumumba “not a bad idea.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find out that Eisenhower himself, as reported by a National Security Council staffer, issued a de facto “order” for the assassination.
And this only scratches the surface. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a thoroughly cross-indexed and even rousing legal brief for International Court of Justice (World Court) indictments of nearly every Western leader of the time. With the jazzy verve of a bewitching graduate school seminar, it flowcharts the algorithms of political reality, where righteous struggle collides with economic power.
Especially, of course, when those rising up are not white. These confrontations are often public, galling, and then more or less forgotten. The fact that Eisenhower still enjoys a decent reputation as a trustworthy twentieth-century power figure only lands more credits in Gore Vidal’s “United States of Amnesia” column.
Reliving the history through Grimonprez’s film, we’re struck with a few self-evident truths—the most glaring of which is that, by speaking with common sense and luminous rage, Lumumba practically drew a bull’s-eye on his own back.
Another of the film’s plain realities is that the United Nations from its beginnings was a dirty hypocrisy, at best a Potemkin assembly, where world leaders like Khrushchev and Nasser were allowed to bark anti-imperialist truisms while the levers of espionage and force were continually being massaged and manipulated behind the scenes. Hammarskjöld secretly denied Lumumba a chance to address the United Nations—when the institution was just fifteen years old—and months later the latter was dead.
Even in terms of optics, the United Nations is seen as a farce. You watch Khrushchev explode before the world’s cameras about America’s tolerance for lynching (“Is this a democracy?!”), and you wish the world had listened.
In a better world, things would be different. In that world, Belgium would have had a Truth & Reconciliation Tribunal, and Grimonprez’s film wouldn’t have to exist. For now, it seems essential that it does.