How the CIA used jazz greats as cover for a 1961 coup in Africa

History is simply a playlist crackling with occurrence and intrigue successful “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.” The film’s heady 2½ hours are arsenic heavy with item arsenic a postgraduate seminar yet bustle similar a TikTok video, a deft and astir breathless archival exposé that centers connected the January 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, little than a twelvemonth aft helium was elected person of the recently formed Democratic Republic of the Congo, astatine past autarkic from Belgium’s assemblage rule.

America’s CIA spearheaded the assassination plot, but this Cold War play revolves similar a kaleidoscope done a far-flung formed of characters, each of them intersecting astatine a pivotal infinitesimal successful the 1960s. Soviet person Nikita Khrushchev famously banged his footwear astatine the United Nations, which had welcomed 16 caller African states to its ranks. Meanwhile, a big of American jazz greats were serving arsenic taste ambassadors — Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie among them — ostensibly to beforehand Yankee goodwill and antiauthoritarian values. Instead, they acted arsenic unknowing decoys for CIA operations.

“It’s precise schizophrenic,” says Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, who fuses unneurotic planetary politics, subterfuge and the state cries of jazz giants specified arsenic Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, Abbey Lincoln and John Coltrane arsenic if they’re of a piece. “Because those artists are asked to correspond a ideology wherever backmost location they’re inactive second-rate citizens,” helium says. “And truthful there’s that paradox arsenic well.”

Grimonprez made “Soundtrack,” an Academy Award nominee for documentary feature, arsenic a mode to reckon with his ain country’s assemblage legacy. After directing “Shadow World,” a 2016 archival dive into the amoral satellite of the planetary arms trade, helium wanted to analyse thing that was close successful beforehand of him yet harder to see.

“All these things were [swept] nether the carpet,” says Grimonprez, who was calved successful 1962. “Nevertheless, Belgium’s past is truthful tied to the Congo. All of Brussels is built with rubber money. It’s benignant of seeped into the ground. It’s a trauma that is unacknowledged connected some sides. It felt important … to bring the communicative backmost location and excavation into the ungraded of my ain country’s history.”

The movie boasts a stunning array of archival footage, from the vaults of the BBC, the U.N. and Belgian and American tv networks, on with Cuba’s Havana Archive, but rarer sources arsenic well. “The location movies are precise important,” Grimonprez says.

The movie makes captious usage of contributions from Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane (“Congo Inc.”), who was raised connected his stepfather’s java plantation, and Eve Blouin, the girl of writer and pan-African activistic Andrée Blouin, Lumumba’s speechwriter and main of protocol, whose excerpted memoirs are work by Marie Daulne of the radical Zap Mama. Grimonprez adjacent managed to unafraid backstage footage of Khrushchev and audiotapes of him speechmaking his memoirs, from the fallen leader’s son.

The filmmaker spent 4 years putting it each unneurotic with exertion Rik Chaubet, with a keen absorption connected ocular bushed and bursts of surprise. “There’s ever a caller constituent that is revealed,” Grimonprez says. “Sometimes it’s not chronological, but we chose [it] for a melodramatic development.”

They took inspiration from a possibly unexpected source: Alfred Hitchcock. As it happens, Hollywood’s maestro of suspense was the playful taxable of Grimonprez’s 2009 effort film, “Double Take,” which besides trafficked successful Cold War tropes arsenic it mediates a fictitious brushwood betwixt Hitchcock and a mysterious double. (Not for thing does Khrushchev besides service arsenic a doppelgänger.)

Thus, the code of “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is “in a sense, what Hitchcock would telephone ‘The Birds’: It’s a drama that becomes a thriller,” Grimonprez says. “So we had a small spot [of that] arsenic well, but the thriller takes implicit astatine the end.”

The music, which besides spotlights the relation of Congolese rumba successful pan-African liberation, functions not arsenic specified soundtrack but what Grimonprez calls a “historical agent.”

“There’s specified beauteous stuff, but past it tin beryllium acceptable against specified horrible things,” helium says, recalling however erstwhile vocalist Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach were playing “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” connected Belgian tv successful 1964 — footage that is enactment to almighty usage successful the movie — determination was a genocide successful the Congo.

Music and authorities collide head-on adjacent the extremity of the film, erstwhile Lincoln helps pb a radical of 60 protesters — including Roach, Maya Angelou and Paul Robeson — arsenic they loudly disrupt a gathering of the U.N. Security Council successful the aftermath of Lumumba’s assassination.

“It’s arsenic James Baldwin says,” Grimonprez suggests, offering a paraphrase of the author. “History is not the past. History is what we are made of. It’s the present. It’s what seeps into our tegument and into our assemblage and our bones.”