Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024)

Not rated.  It's a movie that is centralized around an assassination attempt.  There is real world violence in here that is not for everyone.  But most of the movie is supplied by file footage, which tends to be a little bit more tame than anything filmed by a documentary crew. Some of the subject matter can be controversial, but there's nothing technically that makes the movie too hard to watch.  

DIRECTOR:  Johan Grimonprez

Oh dear.  This is going to be me whining for a good long time.  Actually, it might not be that long because I had a hard time making heads or tails of this documentary.  Someone out there in Internet land might make a fair assessment saying that I might be too dumb for this documentary.  I think, to a certain extent, that might be true.  But it's not that I had a problem with the subject of the documentary.  I had a problem with its execution.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat might be the longest movie I ever watched.  I know it's only two-and-a-half hours.  It was the longest movie I've ever seen.

About a decade ago teaching, I remember when a kid presented a project using Prezi over Powerpoint.  Prezi blew my mind.  It had this aesthetic flair and personality that PowerPoint, overall, seemed to lack.  It was about fluidity.  It seemed so streamlined that I couldn't help but be taken aback by it.  But then more and more kids started to use Prezi.  It wasn't long before Prezi became the norm and the visuals that I considered revolutionary became ho-hum.  I consider Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat to be the Prezi of documentaries.  That's step one of my complaint.  I don't know how to explain the specific visual style of Soundtrack.  (I refuse to write that title over and over.  It's a tank.)   Aesthetically, it offers something incredibly charming. Starting with retro footage of jazz musicians, the entire movie is scored to the jazz greats like Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and more.  The movie insinuates that these jazz greats have a tie to the events happening in the Congo at the same time. 

The problem is that the movie almost fails to make that connection explicit / important. The title and soundtrack to the movie really imply that music is going to play an important part in the narrative of the events with the nation of the Congo gaining independence.  While there is a connection, it only really gets to a "Gee, that's interesting, I guess" level.  I think there's a way to tell the story of how music played an important part in international events.  Heck, I think a podcast could make that connection well where this movie almost had parallel narratives with an occasional crossover from time-to-time.  It's central conceit is lost to a cooler idea that doesn't really exist in this movie.  Again, I'm saying that the events of this movie need to be told in documentary form.  I don't deny that the events that happened between 1958-1961 don't need to be told.  I'm just saying that there's a lot being thrown in here and none of it is explained all that well.

One of the things that I tell my students is not to let the evidence speak for itself.  You need that evidence, but the meat and potatoes of good writing is in the analysis of that evidence.  Now, I am teaching high schoolers as they get ready for college level writing.  If they go into a master's program or a doctoral program, they're going to need to move into a different style of writing that depends far more on bulk evidence.  Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is like reading a doctoral thesis.  It is an info dump of primary sources.  That's very impressive from an academic perspective.  The problem with presenting a doctoral thesis is that most of the people who would read a doctoral thesis come to the thesis with a fairly decent knowledge of the events in question.  What they are looking for is a different perspective on a complex subject matter.  Unfortunately, we're not the doctoral thesis crowd.  I'm not saying that it's forgivable that we don't know much about the CIA and the UN's interference in a democratically elected president.  I'm saying that you need to give us way more context and analysis of the people involved in this story.

There are so many pieces in play here and the movie just gives me long stretches of text and footage of people without a lot of talking heads.  There are a few.  There's a few old timers who were there at the event, explaining what they were doing there.  But these talking heads are few and far between.  Honestly, the need to make a documentary in a unique way may be the worst part of this film.  It is a totally different way to present information.  But that format gets in the way.  It gets in the way hard.  I really wanted to learn a lot about this event and I was actively trying to make connections between all of the different events.  I needed the documentary to hold my hand a little bit and explain why I should care about these seemingly disparate events to make a unified argument.  I get that the assassination of Lumumba had ties to the Civil Rights Movement, coupled with the music scene?  I get that it would have been nifty to have Dizzy Gillespie as president.  I just didn't quite understand how all these points really made sense with one another.

Honestly, I get that this movie is very smart.  I get that there's probably an audience that have been waiting for this movie.  But me, who came into this movie with a good attitude, wanting to learn all about the rise and fall of Lumumba?  I got very little out of it.  It was pulling teeth and I started this movie on board.