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Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

This will be a quickie review as there's a pod to follow that gets into it more. But I'll say right now, I loved this doco. It's an excellent cold war history lesson pieced together from fascinating archive footage, much like Asif Kapadia's films, Senna and Diego Maradona (I guess his other feature docs Amy and Federer are a similar style, but I've not seen them).

This film, directed by Belgian, Johan Grimonprez and edited by Rik Chaubet, is about the murky removal and subsequent assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the (Democratic) Republic of Congo. It's a panoply of found footage, mostly newsreels and old interviews, interspersed with a jazz soundtrack and band visuals that really fit the era. Honestly, this sifting and compiling must have taken a fecking age, so big props to Chaubet and Gimonprez (who has some experience with this form of doc - Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., for example).

The 'stars' include the likes of Nikita Khrushchev, Malcolm X, Dwight Eisenhower, Fidel Castro, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Dag Hammarskjöld, all the big hitters of the late 50s and early 60s, plus a host of jazz names like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and more. The film crackles when Lumumba, Khrushchev and Malcolm X are on screen - I'm no boomer, but jeez, that generation certainly had it over us for charismatic leaders. And of course, there are some shitheels, foremost among them, the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles.

Key scenes that need mention are those involving the work of activist and Lumumba's chief of protocol, speechwriter and confidante, Andrée Blouin, a tough woman pretty much alone is a sea of hard-arsed dudes. Another eye-opener was footage of a UN gallery protest following the news of Lumumba's death. Amazing clip.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is quite similar in style to the great doco When We Were Kings in that it juxtaposes swinging music with world events, almost like a feature length music video. Coincidentally, they also share a location (Zaire, formerly Republic of Congo) and a key villain in Mobutu Sese Seko. Soundtrack possibly overdoes the jazz slightly but I could have watched more than its two and a half hours runtime. One for the history/music nerds. Mintox.

This screens Feb 17 & 18 only (with Dahomey and No Other Land rounding out the week of documentaries) at UWA Somerville for the Perth Festival.

See also:

When We Were Kings (1996), directed by Leon Gast, is brilliant, and Asif Kapadia's Diego Maradona (2019) is another gem.

MILD SPOILERS IN POD!

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