Review: "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat" is Essential Viewing

by Cláudio Alves

One of the year's best and most essential documentaries is finally in theaters! Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is 50% history lesson, 50% jazz concerto, and 100% political essay if you can believe it, a mad dash rollercoaster of a documentary that brings together a litany of ideas under the same cinematic roof, illuminating their connective tissue like few films before it. The entire thing might run for two and a half hours, but you'll hardly notice the time passing since there's no opportunity for passive, apathetic spectatorship. Instead, the filmmakers demand full attention and a modicum of curiosity, trusting the viewer to keep up with Rik Chaubet's miraculous cutting as Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat approaches midcentury decolonization movements through a musical prism…

Patrice Lumumba's rise to power in Congo and his eventual assassination set a timeframe for Soundtrack of a Coup d'Etat, which rhymes these events with musical tours by such acts as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Nina Simone. Whether they realized it or not, many of America's greatest Black musicians were being weaponized as a whitewashing tool, backed by the CIA through the Voice of America radio network to soften the nation's image worldwide. This positions most of the action between 1960 and 1961, though, in good essayistic form, various ideas pull from events outside this limited chronology – indeed, it starts more or less with the Suez Canal takeover in '56 and reaches toward Dizzy Gillespie's 1964 campaign– seemingly reaching across the Cold War and beyond, to European intrusion into Africa.

Grimonprez's documentary is one among many works of non-fiction filmmaking in 2024 which tackle the history of decolonization, contemplating the past to awaken the present to the reality that these struggles aren't over. They never even approached conclusion and we better remember it rather than fall into the illusion that the world's problems have been solved and we can now rest, falsely assured that the worst has been overcome. Mati Diop's Dahomey is the most salient example, but various pictures play within the same geopolitical pool, from the experimental Pepe to Billy Woodberry's Mário, Razan Al Salah's A Stone's Throw, Raoul Peck's portrait of Ernest Cole, and many other urgent works. The thesis statement is clear – we might like to think we live in a post-colonial world but we do not.

For many, that's a hard pill to swallow. Perchance because of that Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat makes use of the musician's art and own histories to provide an entry point into its political musings. When considering such complex topics, one often feels squashed by their enormity and can grow alienated, incapable of engaging with the matters of revolutionaries and those who opposed them, figures of immense power and influence. Music, on the other hand, foments feelings of intimate understanding across time, space, and culture. Not to be too parasocial about it, but it feels easier for the public to relate to these artists than to the politicians. Moreover, their journey of growing awareness more easily echoes the viewer's experience and offers an emotional backbone to the film's intellectual explorations. 

Though many of these stars enjoy legacies closely tied to political activism, not all of them were prescient of their role in America's public relations machine within the broader geopolitical theater. Some came into that knowledge, some bristled against it. Some let it light a fire of rebellion, others accepted their roles in the system and tried to change it from the inside out. Others acquiesced to the status quo and their country's plundering ambition, destabilizing dreams of a united Global South to better ransack the region's resources. Black American artists are never presented as a monolith in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, splintering in as many directions as there are individuals. They are the players in a tragicomic jazz opera of monumental scope, a sobering spectacle that decries complicity, ignorant or not, past, present, and future.

A complicity that transcends the performers, of course. One of the film's most powerful indictments comes in its purview of how the UN has helped destabilize Africa to benefit European interests and how the American government has been a fundamental part of this systemic rot since the beginning. Independence and freedom are only allowed to those in bondage when they come packaged by docility and submission to other white powers. Their resources are too important to leave in the hands of those whose interests might not align with their people over the West. They are fuel for industry and atomic bombs, streams of prosperity that must bypass the African people and go directly into the West's pockets. Same as it ever was, though some voices outside the African bloc offer dissent – Khrushchev, most memorably. 

That being said, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is more than just snapshots of historical decolonization movements intercut with Black American music stars on their global tours and UN debates. Grimonprez is a multimedia artist and that quality imbues itself into his film from the onset, remixing history books into his jazz concerto, using direct citation and on-screen quotes, a bibliographic provocation cum contextualization, not to mention the written testimony of those who saw these events first hand, later interjections from the musical subjects in archival interviews and the like. Moreover, the music isn't mere decoration for the benefit of the audience's ears, but a propulsive rhythmic element that reflects the ideas discussed. Every single part of Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat works towards its glorious purpose, nothing extraneous or purposeless.

Such intersectional and inter-disciplinary political cinema can sound like a tall order for the viewer and, returning to the film's rejected passivity, there's some truth to that. In the context of mainstream cinema, or even documentary filmmaking at its most informative, there tends to be a notion of hand-holding as imperative to a flick's functionality. Grimonprez and his collaborators don't follow that precept, respecting the audience enough to presume their intelligence and interest. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat won't explain who most of its players are because it takes for granted a certain level of prior knowledge, even as it leads one toward a more radical and profound understanding of colonialism in the age of world democracy. Yet, to call it inaccessible would be a terrible lie that ignores this masterpiece's eagerness to engage.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is a dense, dizzying and daring film, a syncopating spectacle that everyone should watch, be it because they want to better understand the context in which we all exist or just because they love great cinema.