By Steve Provizer

This is a chilling tale of the (last) Cold War, and footage of Teslas and iPhones serves as a potent reminder that the struggle for global natural resources, in the Third World and beyond, continues.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, directed by Johan Grimonprez. Opening at New York’s Film Forum on November 1, with national expansion to follow.

This is a tough film to review. It’s rare to find, let alone evaluate, a 2.5 hour documentary, at least one as dense as this one is. As the appraisers say on the Antique Road Shows when they are trying to evaluate an oddity — there are no comparables, at least none they’ve ever seen.

The film covers the period from about 1955 to 1965. The center of gravity is the rise and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the central African country now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire and, during the period of the film, the Belgian Congo. That story unfolds within the broader struggle by Western nations — principally Belgium and the U.S. — to retain rights to the Congo’s uranium and other mineral wealth. For his narrative, Belgian director Johan Grimonprez uses audio memoirs, narrated excerpts of political novels, speeches, interviews, performance videos, home movies, official texts, historical footage, official documents and newsreels.

Grimonprez tries to weave multiple threads throughout this film: the role Belgium, the CIA and the U.N. played in Lumumba’s demise; the rise of the League of African Nations and the anti-imperialism movement; the role of Andree Blouin, Lumumba’s speechwriter, chief of protocol, spy ,and prime mover in the cause of African feminism; Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev’s role as gadfly and anti-capitalist provocateur; Castro, Malcolm X, the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., Disneyland, the several faces of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a passing array of American cold-warriors and, a surprise to me, President of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) William Burden, who had CIA ties and was a stakeholder in the Katanga uranium mine in the Congo.

Mixed into all that are the jazz musicians who theoretically provided the soundtrack for the machinations. Apart from hearing their music, we listen to and watch various musicians speak to political issues: Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp among them, but the primary commenters are Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, who recorded liberationist music and who joined a group that physically disrupted a 1961 meeting of the United Nations.

Some jazz musicians were directly caught up in Cold War politics. Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan were sent abroad as representatives — “ambassadors” — of American democratic values by the US Department of Information, an agency that propagandized for the U.S. way of life. Grimonprez focuses most of his attention on Armstrong and Gillespie. The other jazzmen on the soundtrack (no women in this category) either serve as symbols of the freedom implicit in jazz or their music is interpreted by the director as being an appropriate sonic accompaniment to the visuals: Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane. African musicians are also present, mostly on the soundtrack, though Miriam Makeba is a presence. Willis Conover, producer of Radio Free Europe’s jazz programming, shows up via footage from the TV show To Tell the Truth.

Patrice Lumumba in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. Photo: Harry Pot. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

Putting the word “soundtrack” in a film’s title implies that music will play more than its usual supportive role. Too many soundtracks are conceived with the paternalistic notion that they are supposed to tell the audience what to feel — and there’s some of that here. One example is Grimonprez’s use of Coltrane and his music. The saxophonist never fit comfortably into any particular political box. Yes, Coltrane wrote “Alabama” in response to the Birmingham church bombing, but attempts in interviews, such as that by Frank Kofsky, to have the musician declare himself affiliated with any “ism” don’t pay off. (Kodaky’s interview, for a fee, is available online.) Coltrane simply states he wants to be a “force for good”; he wants the music to speak for itself. During a section in the film about bloodshed in the Congo, Grimonprez intercuts shots of the Coltrane quartet — I believe it’s European footage — playing “My Favorite Things.” At the end of this sequence in the film, for 20 long seconds, we watch Coltrane playing the soprano sax. But the audio has been removed. All we see is a closeup of the kind of intense face the saxophonist made when he concentrated during a performance. It crossed a line for me: I didn’t like the fact that the image of Coltrane, not his music, was being exploited to make a point, and without his permission.

That said, sometimes the film places the music in a subtler relationship with the visuals. Congolese representatives demand freedom in Brussels to the sound of Thelonius Monk. Nina Simone sings “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” as we read onscreen that she was dispatched to Nigeria by the American Society of African Culture — a CIA front. Dizzy talks about being “all about rhythm,” and we see him dancing as Russian Premier Khrushchev rhythmically bangs his shoe on a U.N. desk. Armstrong sings “I’m Confessin’ (that I Love You)” while Eisenhauer entertains Khrushchev at Camp David.

The freedom jazz represents is juxtaposed against the truncation of freedom in the Congo and the U.S. We hear an excerpt from Blakey’s “Freedom Rider” and Roach says that Blakey has the greatest “four-way independence” of any drummer.

The only musicians directly at the center of the political action involving Lumumba and the Congo were Armstrong, Gillespie, and Simone. None of these musicians were asked to be instruments of the government but, according to the film, they were used by authorities that way — especially Armstrong. But there is an ambivalence in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat about the actions of Armstrong and Gillespie. On one hand, we see Diz on TV with Edward R. Murrow, saying he’s not going overseas to sugarcoat domestic segregation. At one point, Armstrong states, regarding our government’s lack of civil rights action, that he won’t go to Russia for the State Department. At another point, Armstrong cops to being exploited by the U.S. government and threatens to renounce his citizenship and move to Ghana.

On the other hand, the film juxtaposes the brazen tactics of the Belgian and the U.S government with Armstrong playing numbers from his usual repertoire, such as “La Vie En Rose.” This leaves us with the sense that Armstrong, in particular, was whistling past the graveyard. There was always an ambiguity between Armstrong the man, and what he said offstage about American politics, and Armstrong the entertainer. The film flattens out the musician’s complex persona.

Gillespie, on his part, is shown explaining to an interviewer that Khrushchev didn’t famously say “I will bury you.” The premier actually said “I love you.” It was the interpreter, according to the trumpeter, who hated America. This didn’t ring true to me. Fact checking the entire film would be an enormous undertaking, but I did check on this. Khrushchev did state ‘We will bury you’. Perhaps this episode was included to make a point about Gillespie’s political naivete. (Note that, unlike the warmongering spin put on the statement by the media, Khrushchev meant that Socialism would, in the course of history, bury capitalism.)

Khrushchev actually comes off much better in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État than he did back in the days of the Cold War. At the time, Americans were led to believe he was an aggressive madman. Shoe banging episode aside, he comes across as a voice of reason throughout this narrative. He chastises the U.S. and the U.N. for their duplicity, calls for disarmament, supports the U.S. civil rights movement, and proposes “death to colonial slavery.”

In the film, not everything is as clear as Khrushchev. It is hard to follow which forces were arrayed against each other at what times. At one point, it seems as if Lumumba was on the run, but then we’re told he still controlled large parts of the country. In the section featuring the silent Coltrane, a war seems to be happening, but we aren’t told who the participants are. We see signs of what seems to be current unrest and displacement, but the protagonists and their actions are obscure.

Nikita Khrushchev and Dwight D. Eisenhower in a scene from Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. Photo: Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

So watching Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat can sometimes be an irritating experience. But there is density and richness here. Apart from the extensive period footage and other documentary content, the film has attractive graphics and other visuals elements that are used to draw the viewer in emotionally: murky footage of a giant octopus, waving fields of grass; grainy, indistinct footage of an elephant being hoisted into the air and later dumped crudely into a cargo ship; home movies shown in slow motion in alternating black and white and color. All this is juxtaposed with ballistic missiles and atomic submarines: an elegiac sensibility is effectively nested within an atmosphere of terror.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s use of jazz calls for a more ambivalent reaction. The director is quoted as saying: “[music] is also an emotional agent that actually gives drama to the historical arc of what that film is about.” Well, yes, this is what soundtracks do. But there is an implicit grandiosity about what the filmmaker says he is trying to accomplish with the music. Just using audio would not be groundbreaking. Using more extended music clips and drawing the viewer into a self-contained musical world would not serve the director’s purposes. Yet the use of jazz as an ‘actor” in the political situation ends up, to my mind, being overdrawn and sometimes distorted. distorting and contorting. I know a lot about the musicians we see in the film, and it is disturbing when they are used as pawns in Grimonprez’s cinematic chess game.

Grimonprez is not a lightweight. His previous films are H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), which uses excerpts from Don DeLillo’s novels Mao II and White Noise to trace the history of media coverage of hijacking. Double Take (2009) presents a fictional Alfred Hitchcock, who explores themes of paranoia and the Cold War. Shadow World (2017) is a nervy investigation into the international arms trade. He aims high with Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat and, despite the misgivings noted, it’s well worth your time. This is a chilling tale of the (last) Cold War, and footage of Teslas and iPhones serves as a potent reminder that the struggle for global natural resources, in the Third World and beyond, continues.

Steve Provizer writes on a range of subjects, most often the arts. He is a musician and blogs about jazz here.