Johan Grimonprez on Making Jazz a Protagonist in ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ and Why “Our Materialist Vision of the World Is Obsolete”

Africa, colonialism, the United Nations, the 1961 assassination of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nikita Khrushchev, Tesla, iPhones, and jazz music come together in director Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. The documentary feels like a concert with academic footnotes and references or performance art. It also investigates the filmmaker’s native Belgium’s colonial history and complicity in stifling Congolese independence. 

The Hollywood Reporter‘s review of the film, which had its world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation, called it “riveting and propulsive,” noting that the “kinetic doc connects jazz, decolonization and the birth of the United Nations.”

Kino Lorber has partnered with specialist streamer Kanopy on the U.S. release of the film, which hits cinemas on Nov. 1. The filmmaker will next be honored at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November.

As his latest film screens at the San Sebastian Film Festival, which wraps up on Saturday, Grimonprez spoke to THR about how Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat came about, the dark colonial history it explores, using music as a protagonist, why Khrushchev has become a recurring character in his films, and why humanity needs a shift from a paradigm of profit to a paradigm of kinship.

I grew up in Austria, so I know some of the history of the United Nations, which has one of its four major office sites in Vienna. But I was really curious how much you knew about the history of the Congo and Belgium’s role there as a colonial power and beyond. How much did you learn about that in school?

The Congo was always called “l’empire du silence,” the Empire of Silence. So in essence, we didn’t hear much about it, especially the things that are talked about in the film, because that’s a black page of our own history here in Belgium. We never learned about that. Even today, well, we have a Lumumba Square here in Brussels — I’m very close to it. Actually, all the avenues are built with rubber money, so you have to rename them all. In school, we didn’t learn about this, definitely not about the murder and the complicity of my country.

Is that why you wanted to make this movie? And am I right to assume that you do not see the film as solely a Belgian story but also a universal story, similar to your previous film Shadow World, which was an investigation into the multi-billion dollar international arms trade?

Belgium is a small country. We have NATO, which you can actually call [U.S. aerospace and defense manufacturer] Lockheed [Martin] because it’s the same thing. They sell F-35s to all the NATO countries. But Belgium was not so much part of Shadow World, and I found it necessary to go back and dig into the history of my own country. Belgium really had a big impact at the beginning of the ’60s when that [African] independence movement came about and the Global South was steering towards non-alignments. The way that was smothered was ground zero of how the West would deal with this independence and non-aligned movement was actually what happened in the Congo, the overthrow and the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

That was just before the UN [General Assemby], and there was so much linked. I didn’t know that was when [Soviet Communist leader] Nikita Khrushchev slammed his shoe [banging his UN delegate table with it]. Khrushchev has been very much prominent in my previous films, like in Double Take [which combines documentary and fictional elements to tell the story of a fictionalized version of Alfred Hitchcock], where he’s functioning as a Hitchcock doppelganger. I did not know that that was because of the history of Belgium, our colonial history.

So all these things are sort of intertwined. He had also invited all world leaders to a dialog about decolonization and demilitarization, and not to make Khrushchev into a saint … but it’s interesting to hear him. Like Hitchcock said: The more you make your villain interesting, and the more handsome and more peculiar and strong character, the more the hero has to work. So I think hearing the story from the point of view of the villain is always more interesting.

The music is so integrated into the movie. Talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea to merge the jazz element with the bigger world affairs story here.

Well, yeah, the music is also a historical agent. Sifting through all the research and the archives, I knew that Louis Armstrong headed to the Congo twice. He did it during the third week of October and the third week of November 1960. And it’s exactly those moments. It’s the moment that Patrice Lumumba was put in exile in his own country and his own house.

On Sept. 14, [Army Colonel Joseph] Mobutu fires the whole parliament, and one week later is the shoe-banging talk. And just weeks later is the moment where Louis Armstrong arrived in the Congo because they had that program. It was the United States Information Agency sending musicians abroad, specifically a lot of Black jazz musicians, like Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone. Tracing what was going on with those jazz tours: When Louis Armstrong arrived in the Congo, a plot was being planned by the CIA to overthrow the government. When Duke Ellington arrived in Baghdad in 1963 — this is not part of the film, but the same night of his concert — there was a coup in the palace in Baghdad. So I was tracing the political parallel story of what’s going on with those jazz ambassadors who were always sent to the trouble spots. It’s like what the tour organizer says of the Dizzy Gillespie tour [in the film]: “We were sent as the Black kamikaze band.”

Not everyone seemed to be happy about this all the time, right? But I liked that comparison…

That doesn’t mean that they’re passive agents, right? So, for example, Louis Armstrong refused to go play for an Apartheid audience in South Africa. Or he would change his text. In the song “Black & Blue?” at one point he says, “I’m white inside.” He changed the text to “I am right inside,” which is very subtle, but it’s a big difference in meaning. So they were used as a propaganda tool. But that doesn’t mean that they were actually reduced to just being passive agents.

There’s very much agency. They also went around the world. I also found in the Belgian archives this concert by the Max Roach Quartet, where Abbey Lincoln is screaming her head off. That album, We Insist!, was broadcast in its entirety on Belgian television in 1964. But 1964 is also the moment of the genocide. So this is the flip side again — you have that wonderful concert on Belgian television where we were all glued to the television set watching jazz, but at the same time, in all silence, the genocide is happening in Congo.

It was also Abbey Lincoln, together with Maya Angelou, who initiated that protest when Adlai Stevenson, the then-U.S. ambassador, announced to his colleagues that Patrice Lumumba had been murdered. So, Lincoln and 60 other protesters stand up and start screaming in the Security Council. And again, it’s musicians who initiated that protest. So for me, the music is very much a protagonist.

Have you ever seen music used in a film in a similar way?

Sort of. At IDFA, I’m the guest of honor, and I’m going to present my top 100 films. I joke about it because it’s not going to be top 10, as they announced. It’s going to be the top 100. And there’s a [Jean-Luc] Godard film, Sympathy for the Devil. It’s Godard filming in the studio with the Rolling Stones, filming how they come to that song. And all over the film, he’s juxtaposing this with political images of that era. And so it’s quite interesting.

I thought the music was really crucial. You write in the editing and in the research [process]. You stumble onto moments that you cannot not include in the film, like the [Abbey Lincoln] scream. Also, the civil rights movement was also very much taking its inspiration from the independence movement. And this went back and forth, of course. Malcolm X makes that relationship very clear.

The same is true for the music. The rumba, for example, comes actually from the transatlantic crossing of the slaves to Cuba. And there’s a huge Congolese heritage in Cuba that became the conga that led to the cha-cha-cha that then came back. So it’s a back-and-forth. I thought that was interesting to explore. So if you listen well, just like elephants do — every other hour, they stretch their ears, and they listen where they’re going to go next — if you listen well to the archives and to the history, you cannot not include that. It was something that we had to take on.

Your film runs for 150 minutes. It doesn’t feel like it, but did you ever think about the length?

Actually, a lot of people say: “Wow, this was two hours and a half? It was over before we noticed.” It’s funny with music. If you add music, it accelerates things. You get really drawn in, it really gives an empathic feeling. That’s the emotional side to the film. While politics is all about divide-and-conquer, it’s the music that brings people together. But I think it also brings the audience together in the viewing of the film. It really takes you through. It’s not only a historical agent, but it’s also an emotional agent that actually gives drama to the historical arc of what that film is about.

So it’s like a two-and-a-half-hour music clip that actually gives you a lot of history at the same time, told through a true story, but as a PDF where you have all the academic notes and even pages of references in the film. There’s all these genres that are clashing.

We really wanted to make it that thriller story. It starts off as sort of a comedy, and it leads to where the thriller element sinks in, and then the music takes you all the way to the end where you cannot not scream. But the thriller element was first. Let’s make the story of the thriller as clear as possible. Who are the players? The mining industry, the big Western powers, the United Nations, the whole rift between East and West, the independence movement, the musicians. So it was trying to look for what makes this movie, what story makes the movie go forward and really stick to that.

Do you think that much has changed in the world since 1960 and 1961 which the film focuses on?

Well, it was ground zero, and what was set in motion then is very much what’s going on today. That’s why the iPhone and Tesla commercials are actually in the film. And there are more references, such as the 80,000-plus women that are raped. Rape is used as a weapon of war. So all of that is what’s going on today, and it has not changed at all if it’s not worse. It’s still the mining industry that holds the strings. It’s the same players.

If you see Dennis Mukwege’s [2018] Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, I get tears in my eyes when he says what’s still going on. If you put a map of the East Congo, a map of where the mining is and the statistics of how many women are raped, it’s one on one a complete correlation. So we wanted to allude to that at the very end of the film where [Belgian-Congolese writer] In Koli Jean Bofane says the minerals of all wars in the 20th century and the war in space all come from the Congo, but not even one Congolese is benefiting from it, except for the kleptocracy running the country. And it’s genocide after genocide after genocide.

What will your next film focus on?

It seems like every six, seven years, I get another film made. The previous one was on the defense industry. This one was digging into our own backyard and the black page in the history of my own country. But the film that I’d love to explore next is what I call “Tea With E.T.” You could call it a multi-species parliament. It’s about the unknown other, or the othering that is happening and our connection to the world. It’s about trying to define consciousness.

I also teach and lecture, and often my films grow out of that practice. I feel what’s really at stake today, and that we have not defined, is consciousness and how our materialist vision of the world is completely obsolete. Matter has never been defined, and we’re all in relation to one another. And matter has made subject and object into a rift where we all feel separated from one another, and we feel separated from nature. And nature is called nature because then we can exploit it. But if you pollute the river, you pollute yourself. So it’s conceived as a bigger question: What is consciousness? It’s a point of departure, but I don’t know yet where it is going to head.

Anything else you’d like to share?

The new territory that I’m trying to explore that’s so crucial is to get away from the paradigm of profit to the paradigm of connection, to the paradigm of kinship. That’s something that really keeps me busy.