It’s been quite a year for thrillingly inventive music documentaries. First there was Gary Hustwit’s Eno, a groundbreaking portrait of the pioneering musician, producer and artist that tore up the rules of cinema and reinvented itself with each new screening. And now there’s Belgian film-maker Johan Grimonprez’s dazzling Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a breathtaking, ideas-packed journey that weaves together American jazz and the geopolitical machinations of the 1950s and 60s. It’s almost reductive to describe this extraordinary essay film as a music documentary – it’s about so much: the cold war; the bloody fingerprints of colonialism in Africa; the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo; Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe. But linking it all is an eye-opening exploration of the politics of jazz, and the music itself, freewheeling and skittish and pulsing through every frame.
This densely detailed and fascinating film skips between timelines and continents. It covers the CIA’s use of unwitting jazz musicians (Louis Armstrong, for example) as distractions to cover their political meddling in various countries. It touches on the incredible Andrée Blouin – Lumumba’s adviser and speechwriter, women’s rights activist and a figure who warrants a whole other documentary dedicated to her remarkable life. There are snippets of adverts for iPhones and Teslas, acknowledging how the mineral resources of the DRC made it such a prized target for colonial powers, and tying the country’s past to the unfolding story in the present day. Informative, exhaustively researched, but never dry or didactic, this is a phenomenal achievement by Grimonprez, who holds his own country to account for its shameful role in this sorry tale.
In UK and Irish cinemas
