Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Patrice Lumumba

Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is a documentary that focuses on the machinations that led to the overthrow and death of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Grimonprez places this story within the context of the rise of the non-aligned nations of that era which were struggling to free themselves from the shackles of colonialism. The "soundtrack" part of the film features, mostly, American jazz musicians unleashing titanic performances. The keynote piece is Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, released in 1960 and an attempt is made to link the Afro-American struggle for civil rights with emerging African nations attempts to free themselves from the yoke of European rule. Less successful, is Grimonprez's attempts to show how overseas tours by US jazz performers, funded by CIA front groups, distracted those abroad from the Western intelligence community's international chicanery. People abroad were not so easily hornswoggled, even in that far off time.

I did like the lack of narration in the documentary. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat paints too broad a canvas for Grimonprez to lump his disparate threads into one monolithic narrative. He takes care to list his sources, though I think his cherry picking of said sources displays his bias. The manifold sins of the CIA are fully explored while the KGB rates nary a mention. Grimonprez unquestioningly displays speeches by Khrushchev and Castro supporting the non-aligned nations with little to no context. Now Grimonprez has previously explored the paranoia of the Cold War era in his documentary Double Take, so he may not have wanted to repeat himself. However, he paints a false binary view of the US: we see a lying Eisenhower and a truth telling Malcolm X. King and Kennedy never appear. I also think Grimonprez downplays Belgian culpability in the death of Lumumba and the severe cruelty of the Belgian rule of the Congo before 1960. Grimonprez does indeed hail from Belgium and the film provides a cursory looks at Belgian culture, such as it is. Much as I adore the film's footage of US jazz giants, I would have preferred to hear more from the African artists like Franco and OK Jazz that are featured far too briefly.

Despite my little Bichon Frisé reservations, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is an enjoyable film with a vivid gallery of talking heads that fly by swiftly, despite the film's length, because Grimonprez marshals an enormous amount of sound and imagery into a fairly digestible package.  I swam willingly in the stream of its powerful, if somewhat one-dimensional screed. Sometimes the effect verges on overload, I didn't see the point of juxtaposing Khrushchev speaking at the UN with shots of children enjoying a puppet show except for the most obvious point. I did appreciate the segments featuring Andrée Blouin and In Koli Jean Bofane, the author of the searing Congo Inc. It is the rich mineral deposits of the southern Congo, as Bofane points out, that have caught the focus of the world's great powers. A day after China's cessation of rare mineral exports to the US, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat looks even more pertinent.