It’s likely cliché to describe any movie’s editing style as being similar to jazz, but in the case of Soundtrack to a Coup d’État the descriptor is literal.  The anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums overlay news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes in this essay-style documentary film, which covers the CIA’s efforts to rebrand the Cold War as a “Cool War” by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from its conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government.  While political figures of the era as formidable & dissonant as Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Malcolm X weigh in on the UN machinations that led to the CIA’s conspiracy to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the soundtrack to that coup is provided by formidable & dissonant jazz greats of the era: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and, most improbably, Louis Armstrong.  That soundtrack is not a formalistic choice made by director Johan Grimonprez so much as it is the core of his subject.  He details how those musicians were manipulated into working as semi-official “jazz ambassadors” for Black American culture in African nations that recently joined the UN, and how those ambassadors of Cool were used to distract from and cover for the planned execution of a newly sovereign foreign leader. 

There’s a sharp specificity to this doc’s subject, walking the audience through how African nations newly inducted into the United Nations were seen as a threat to be squashed by paranoid US leadership.  Their power within the UN as a young, organized voting block was especially threatening to the US government’s interests, since it relied on those nations remaining colonized so they could be mined for uranium supplies in the ongoing nuclear Cold War against the Communist Bloc.  Each subversive maneuver to ensure Belgium’s continued rule over the Congo is thoroughly documented in the onscreen text that interrupts the archival clips, often with page numbers & footnotes to encourage further research on your own time.  What Khrushchev describes as the “cacophony” of jazz guides the everything-goes, free-association editing style of that archival footage, so that the film ends up snapshotting the greater context of late-50s & early-60s global culture outside its duty to detail the step-by-step progress of its titular coup.  By the time Khrushchev is making jokes about visiting Disney World in a press conference attended by Marilyn Monroe, it plays like an alternate version of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy made for lefty academics: an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania that captures & compresses the moral & political rot of an entire era.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s focus on the CIA’s appropriation & manipulation of Black American artists recalls a few other recent documentaries about the politics of Black artistic life in the US, namely Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and I Am Not Your Negro.  It distinguishes itself from that cluster of radical docs by slightly shifting focus away from Civil Rights clashes of the 1960s to a different form of racist US state violence, but it’s still racist US state violence all the same.  Grimonprez uses a key Malcolm X clip to link the two struggles, in which the activist encourages his audience to get angrier about the US’s violence abroad instead of just the Civil Rights struggle at home, emphasizing that foreign governments are dropping American bombs on Americans’ behalf.  All efforts to de-colonize are worth supporting, but it’s especially egregious to ignore the ones suppressed by bombs bearing your country’s name.  That line of thought has obvious current relevance in the continued bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military—backed by US weapons supplies—resonating just as loudly as the continued cultural racism of the US and the continued, aggressive unpredictability of jazz.  It’s a documentary about a very specific political moment in time, but the global fight for post-colonial freedom smashes through that temporal window.

-Brandon Ledet