Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: A frenetic account of history

People who think that history documentaries have to be dry compositions ping-ponging between archival footage, photography, and talking heads will get knocked out of their socks by a mere glimpse at Johan Grimonprez’s award-winning 2024 film, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. 

From the very start, the build up to Max Roach’s Abbey Lincoln-performed song “Freedom Day” hooks the viewer in along with a mercenary’s brief testimony on the act of killing. 

This sets the tone for the rest of the film as it recounts the turbulence of decolonialization and post-independence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.), which led to the assassination of the first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. 

It is a criminally overlooked Cold War event that the film bookends with an incident where 60 protestors crashed a United Nations Security Council session to decry the murder.

In a way, the film’s pace could be viewed as metacontextual to the rapid destabilization of the D.R.C. from proud independence to UN intervention within a month after the American and Belgian-backed secession of Katanga to secure western access to uranium mines. 

Resource extraction-based troubles continue to plague the country in modern times, as represented by the intrusions of contemporary Tesla and iPhone advertisements.

The film frequently, and pointedly, departs from the Congo to show the wider geopolitical context that surrounded — and directly led to — the crises and conflicts that befell the country before the coup d’état’s coup de grâce. 

In these departures, we are introduced to a cavalcade of actors, mainly musicians and politicians, who played a multitude of roles of varying scales. From diplomats, bureaucrats, secret agents, social activists, military personnel, and politicians to jazz musicians, the overlapping and interconnecting cast of characters adds a vibrancy to the proceedings. 

This is only outdone by the exquisitely curated soundtrack of jazz and blues songs from the likes of Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Le Grand Kallé, and many more.

Unlike most documentaries, this film has no single host or narrator to take centre stage and guide the plot like a museum tour. Rather, the events are allowed to tell their own story. 

This unstructured structure forces the viewer to pay closer attention as it becomes their duty to connect the informational dots themselves. Yet, the film manages to avoid becoming so overwhelming as to leave you completely lost — if you do not get what’s going on, it is on you.

That being said, the two-and-a-half-hour runtime does make this film a lengthy watch, which requires a full free evening to see its completion. 

The mélange of spoken languages necessitates subtitles, which will not be the only bit of reading that viewers have to do. The heavy use of onscreen text — most of which are from literature, memorandums, correspondences, and more, appropriately cited as such — can make it feel like a sort of audio or visual essay. 

However, all of these work in conjunction to force, and reward, the audience for doing their due diligence and actually paying attention. Zoning out or skipping sections costs you the full experience, which is an incredibly irresponsible loss if you think that using this as white noise to be played in the background is acceptable.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a stimulant that you cannot help but stay hooked into for as long as possible. 

If you were not familiar with Cold War political intrigue and history before this documentary, then use it as a stepping stone for immersing yourself in the harsh realities that the period was defined by. From there, you will come to understand the modern world just as thoroughly as well.