Critics reviews

This documentary has a weakness far more serious and consequential than the hybrid manner in which it combines music and history. That is its uncritical attitude toward nationalism, and pan-Africanism in particular.

Here the film really shines: cleverly juxtaposing how governments treat their people, and undress the hypocrisy of powerful Western nations imposing their will on African ones. There’s genuine nuance to Grimonprez’s storytelling.

Informative, exhaustively researched, but never dry or didactic, this is a phenomenal achievement by Grimonprez, who holds his own country to account for its shameful role in this sorry tale.

That angry convergence of jazz and politics is what bookends Grimonprez’s vault-driven, media-conscious inquiry, and sets the tone for the connective tissue of who’s who. In its audio-visual swirl of outrage, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” — one of the year’s very best documentaries — is nothing but deep cuts.

The film never lets up. Pieced together from carefully colour-graded archive footage and the contemporaneous testimonies of Khrushchev, Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane and Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat finds an unlikely villain in its propulsive score: jazz.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a dense and meticulously constructed picture. Grimonprez packs a daunting amount of detail and incident into 150 minutes while encouraging viewers to dig even deeper into these events, with the source of every quotation and fact being cited on screen... On a moment-by-moment basis, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is as exhilarating and illuminating a history lesson as you’ll ever have...

Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he [Johan Grimonprez] amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961; a strange and jazzy new “cool war” offensive in which the American intelligence services, through various fronts, tried to export jazz music by black American musicians to Africa, to win hearts and minds.

To see the archival footage of Patrice Lumumba, which serves as the backbone to the forceful documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” is to witness a daring future that, due to the rot of colonialism, tragically never came to pass. The foil to the film’s incisive use of newsreels, excerpts from biographies and political speeches is the kinetic wielding of jazz music.

In making “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.

Writer and director Johan Grimonprez sets himself a difficult task with “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” yet accomplishes it with astonishing success. The film plays like both a dense historical text and a lively jazz concert while proving itself to be an invigorating piece of documentary filmmaking.

What Grimonprez creates here is a mind-blowingly rich tapestry of research, music, and the jazziest history lesson imaginable, in part delivered through fact-based title cards designed like renowned covers of Blue Note albums, with their freewheeling beats and riffs echoing into today with urgent purpose.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is, perhaps, most effective in its repurposing of archival footage and audio, collapsing time and space in ways that make us more attuned to the perpetuity of post-colonial struggle.