Congo, colonialism, Cold War, conflict and all that jazz
Daniel Nelson
How to make an entertaining film documentary on a complex subject? Jazz it up. Directors tend to add humour, rapid cuts, weird images, witty captions, and animation - any device to keep audiences interested.
It rarely works: the fun distracts from the serious stuff. But Johan Grimonprez has smashed it with Soundtrack to a coup d’etat.
It’s a film essay investigating the murder of Congo’s liberation leader, Patrice Lumumba.
It also colours in the geopolitical background, which is the collapse of colonialism and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement, perversely seen by the US and its Western followers as picking the wrong side in the Cold War. Along the way, the film introduces us to an extraordinary set of characters, such as Andrée Madeleine Blouin, activist, rights advocate and writer from the Central African Republic who deserves a film in her own right (whet your appetite with her Wikipedia entry).
The film runs for more than two hours, it deals with historical events of which audiences were never aware or remember little, a country of which they know nothing, a continent about which they care even less, whose politicians speak French rather than English.
Grimonprez has jazzed it up and made it hugely watchable by the boldness of the editing and presentation and by, well, jazz.
Because as the US tried to win hearts and minds in its anti-communist crusade, it used not only murder, deceit, bribery and violence against individuals and countries but also free-wheeling, convention-cracking jazz, sponsoring big-name musicians such as Louis Armstrong on foreign tours. (The CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom also secretly sponsored respected intellectual publications, but even a wide-ranging film essay such as this cannot cover every aspect of those turbulent times.)
So, as Armstrong and Bing Crosby sang in the film High Society, “Now you has jazz, jazz, jazz”, as well as politics, international intrigue, racism, commercial greed and, above all, natural resources – including securing Congo’s uranium for America’s nuclear arsenal (and today coltan for mobile phones and laptops).
In truth, the CIA’s use of jazz (music loathed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev), though fascinating, could have been entirely cut to make a simpler, shorter film, but it supercharges the viewer’s emotions. There are also a few too many unrelated photos and videos aimed at graphically underlining a point.
There’s no running commentary but powerful contemporaneous newsreel coverage and hateful, shameful interviews involving smirking admissions of nefarious chicanery by politicians and security agency officials (“We all pay the same agents and we all read the same reports”).
It’s a shocking, ruthless tale of realpolitik. Tragically, if a similar film is made in 2044 it will chronicle similar destruction in the Congo by outside countries today, African and Asian as well as North American and European.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is showing at the BFI London Film Festival on 15 and 17 October and at selected UK cinemas from 15 November.