This article appeared in the November 1, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)

To make a movie is to appropriate—either that which is before the camera or something already filmed. These days, I prefer the latter. Terrific compilation docs shown in festivals this past year include Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris mon amour, and Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President. None, though, pack the wallop of Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve seen a better movie-movie all year.

Most simply described, Soundtrack is a case study of decolonization, neo-imperialism, cultural exploitation, and political murder. Centered on the former Belgian Congo circa 1960, albeit ranging afield, it’s told through a dense mix of newsreels, TV broadcasts, home movies, and headlines—an assemblage for which jazz, from both American and African musicians, sets the tempo. This grim, exciting history lesson announces itself with percussive fanfare courtesy of legendary bebop pioneer and bandleader Max Roach. Roach’s drums underscore a volley of messages between singer-actress Abbey Lincoln (his then-wife) and polymath performer Maya Angelou, regarding a planned demonstration at the UN to protest the U.S.–sanctioned murder of Patrice Lumumba, the deposed leader of the newly independent Republic of Congo.

Their action forcefully globalized the civil-rights struggle. Front page news in February 1961, the demo is a fraught footnote to the Cold War geopolitics that’s been Grimonprez’s career-long obsession. His feature-length video compilation Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) meditated on the history of airplane hijackings. His clever but only intermittently successful essay film Double Take (2009) inserted Alfred Hitchcock alongside Nixon, Khrushchev, and Kennedy as a player in the post-Sputnik, pre-Vietnam context of the Missile Gap and Space Race. These films have their playful aspects. Grimonprez’s most recent feature documentary, Shadow World (2016), based on Andrew Feinstein’s exposé of the mega-billion-dollar global arms trade, was sufficiently straightforward to be televised by PBS. Soundtrack, though more formally inventive, has a kindred urgency fueled, according to Grimonprez, by a necessity to deal with the colonial crimes of his home country.

Having established Black American solidarity with African liberation in its opening moments, Soundtrack flashes back to the 1955 Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned (then called Third-World) nations and the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to “save” the canal. (It should be noted that the U.S. successfully pressured them to withdraw.) Ghana achieved independence in 1957, Guinea in 1958, and in 1960, 17 more African nations joined them. These included the Congo, arguably the most brutally colonized of all. Freedom, as is made clear in Soundtrack, had a global dimension. The year of sit-ins in the segregated South, 1960 also marked the first anniversary of Castro’s victory in the Cuban Revolution.

Another recent musical compilation doc, Andrei Ujică’s estimable TWST / Things We Said Today, focuses on The Beatles’ 1965 concert at the since-demolished Shea Stadium. Soundtrack revisits an even more stellar event in New York City’s history—namely, the Fall 1960 session of the UN General Assembly—with a collage of footage comprising a who’s who of Third-World leaders, though the big show was stolen by jovial Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s rowdy, fist-pounding denunciation of neocolonialism. Grimonprez further features Fidel Castro and his entourage, also in town; at the invitation of Malcolm X, the Cubans decamped to Harlem’s Hotel Theresa on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, where we see them holding court with Khrushchev, Nasser, Nehru, and Allen Ginsberg.

A movie of crisp graphics and snazzy ’60s fonts, as well as provocative, polyrhythmic sound-image juxtapositions, Soundtrack has a surfeit of great characters. Heroes include the so-called Black Passionaria, Andrée Blouin; among the villains: the despicable, pipe-sucking CIA boss Allen Dulles, who, asked about his spycraft, says, “We all pay the same agents, and we all get the same reports.” If the star political performers are Khrushchev and Malcolm X, great musicians are ubiquitous: John Coltrane talking about Malcolm X, Nina Simone singing “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” and Miriam Makeba addressing the UN.

The channel-surfing global-village simultaneity grows increasingly intense as the Congo’s independence approaches midway through the movie. In archival footage and on the soundtrack, OK Jazz, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Art Blakey follow up on Lumumba’s blunt Independence Day speech that, delivered in the presence of Belgium’s king and greeted with silence, accused Belgians of racism, theft, and oppression. Days later, the army mutinied, Belgian settlers fled, the province of Katanga seceded, and Lumumba came to New York to address the UN and speak in front of Louis Michaux’s bookstore on the corner of 125th street and Lenox Avenue. Eisenhower refused to see him, but through William A.M. Burden, the MoMA trustee–turned–ambassador to Belgium, he gave a tacit OK to terminate the prime minister. In early September, Lumumba fired the ceremonial president Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who had just fired him. UN troops arrived, and Congolese Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobuto dissolved the government, seized power, and put Lumumba under house arrest.

Throughout, Grimonprez conveys the whirlwind of events via a dense collage of archival footage, headlines, and music, with a few (period-specific) talking heads. Soundtrack is well-sourced and generally scrupulous, although Grimonprez occasionally privileges drama over chronology. (A few sequences postdate the central coup: Gualtiero Jacopetti, co-director of 1962’s Mondo Cane, was filming atrocities in the Congo in November 1964—the same year that Dizzy Gillespie launched his presidential campaign, promising to appoint Duke Ellington secretary of state and Malcolm X attorney general.) Most of it, however, is impossible to make up: the State Department dispatched Louis Armstrong on a “goodwill mission” to the Congo in October 1960 that was correctly described by jazz-hater Khrushchev as a diversion.

Actually, it was even worse: Armstrong was unwittingly exploited as a mule when his return flight was loaded up with Katangese uranium. If the USIA considered Louis Armstrong to be “America’s secret weapon,” so in a sense was the colonized Congo, which had furnished the uranium used to make the first atomic bombs. Three months later, on January 17, 1961, Lumumba was secretly executed in Katanga. His death would not be reported until mid-February. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat closes by circling back to its opening sequence—this time with actual, amazingly riotous footage of the UN demonstration—to end with Abbey Lincoln’s extraordinary, wordless wail of grief.

The classic 1982 compilation doc The Atomic Cafe carved out a place in film history by using government documents and period music to make light of nuclear holocaust in ways both horrifying and hilarious. Dealing with facts rather than hypotheticals, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat has an even more confounding dialectic. An unflinching reminder of America’s cynical, immeasurably destructive Cold War realpolitik, the film simultaneously celebrates the greatness of American artists, from Armstrong through Gillespie and Roach to Simone and Coleman, whose legacies Soundtrack serves to burnish.

J. Hoberman is a New York–based film-and-culture critic, currently teaching at Columbia University, and a contributing editor to Film Comment.