Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

02/04/2026

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A River of Crocodiles

Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a marvellously slippery account of events surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. It manages to arrive at truths without simply relying on facts, even if they are central to the exploration. The film may well implicate the CIA, may well make clear that great black musicians were used by the intelligence agency, creating covert opportunities to destabilise African governments at a time when many nations in the region were becoming independent. But it does so with a constant awareness that truth and facts aren’t quite one and the same, as we will later explain using ancient notions of rhetoric, ethos and pathos.
It is, in the best sense of the term, an essay film, and yet though Grimonprez is credited as writer/director, the work is very different from many an essayistic documentary that, while made up chiefly of images, is also written. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a film written in the editing suite. This might seem to be so with many a documentary forgoing voiceover. However, such works rarely fall under the term essay film. Works by the Masyles brothers like Salesman, Leacock’s Primary or Frederick Wiseman’s High School, don’t essay – they observe, scrutinising the material recorded, all the better to get the viewer to look with the same observational acuity. When we watch the bible salesman Paul Brennan struggling not just to sell Bibles but with his life more generally, much of this must be implicitly understood. We may discover, elsewhere, that he was separating from his wife and had a serious drink problem, but there is nothing in the film, no voiceover, for example, informing us that this is the case.
Grimonprez’s film is very far from such observational work, but it is as though he asks of the essay film an implicit comprehension equal to the Maysles’s and co, yet does so with the emphasis on montage over, if not the long take, at least the non-juxtapositional one. When the Maysles cut from a figure in the salesman’s firm offering a motivational speech to the various salesmen looking on, we might wonder what is on their minds as we see their faces, but these are shots that chiefly remain contained by the specifics of mise en scene. A juxtapositional documentary can arrive at the essayistic by resisting the fidelity to screen space, yet without feeling obliged to use voiceover narration. Few recent examples do it better than Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.
It does, of course, rely on language as the film is punctuated with various quotes and statements, often with accompanying dates, and that could, in other circumstances, be part of a Powerpoint presentation. One of the first is from President Eisenhower, who ‘‘expresses his wish that the Congolese president would fall into a river of crocodiles.’’ It is a remark dated Washington, September 19th, 1960, and establishes promptly what the film will be about: that though during the post-war years, African nations were gaining their independence, this didn’t mean Western powers were going to allow them to become too big for their boots. Especially when, for so long, US and European interests had been fillings theirs with African booty. Lumumba was far from the only or even the first African post-war figure to insist that the resources were theirs: Nasser, after all, gave the British a bloody nose over Suez. But he would become the most conspicuous one when it came to realising that just because the West no longer had colonial authority, that didn’t mean African nations would be free to choose whoever they liked as their leader. The film shows implicitly what happens when they try. The Eisenhower remark comes up first, and then, seconds later, Grimonprez adds to the same intertitle,’’ the British foreign minister’s response, ‘‘regretfully, we’ve lost the techniques of old-fashioned diplomacy.’’ Just seconds of screen time after this, another intertitle comes up. It is by Maya Angelou from the following year: Our brother Lumumba has been killed in the Congo.’’ That potentially jocular exchange between Eisenhower and the UK carries the force of criminal intent: British and American powers talk about Lumumba’s death; less than a year afterwards, he is assassinated.
Some analytically inclined film theorists have concluded that film cannot do philosophy because it lacks the grammar for argument. Paisley Livingston believes, ‘’Although it may be plausible to report that an experience of a work's montage or motion picture style has given rise to a vivid, visually mediated recollection of some previously known philosophical thought, it is fair to ask whether such appeals to experience can offer good grounds for believing that a significantly new idea or argument has emerged.’’ (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism) Yet one may instead argue that it does philosophy in a different way due to grammatical differences, rather than that philosophy offers discursive prose. An image doesn’t have a tense, and even those put together have them only because of the presumption the viewer will make between one shot and the next. When a writer says the person went down the street and into the shop, the cause and effects are clear. When a filmmaker cuts between a person walking along the pavement and then going into a store, it only appears to be. It is partly why we have the term creative geography, as Lev Kuleshov showed that time and space are often united in the viewer’s mind, rather than features of the images themselves. Kuleshov illustrates this when showing that characters would be looking out onto a field of poles, but the poles and the characters were in different parts of Moscow. The viewer, however, assumes they occupy the same immediate environment. Equally, when a character walks along the road, and the next shot shows him going into a cafe, the viewer will assume that the time and space are coherent, even if the street is in New York, but the cafe is in Toronto. The film might choose to retain this impression (many films use Toronto to double as New York), or to counter it, all the better to wrong-foot the viewer diegetically or non-diegetically. It can become an aspect of the story or an aspect of the form, with someone only looking as though they are still in New York, but, between the two shots, there has been an ellipsis, as we then realise the character is in a different city. Equally, it can be a formal device never explained and only utilised. This can happen when we are reduced to wondering if we are witnessing a continuity error or a transition, and left in a state of constructive ambiguity concerning the status of the image.
Godard would sometimes do this(in Slow Motion, for example), and another good example comes from Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours. The central character says she is going out, and the film cuts to her and her friends arriving at a party. Yet the clothes she wears are different from those she was wearing when she announced she was going out, and the assumptions we have about form as filmic cause and effect (going out and then arriving at a destination) is countered by the clothing that says time has passed – a day, week or a month, we cannot say. Pialat may be less radical with the form than Godard often is, but he can create forceful ambiguities out of insisting we don’t fall too easily into cause-and-effect assumptions.
The upshot of this is that film is a great medium of argumentative inference rather than argumentative insistence, and if it can’t quite do philosophy as many an analytic thinker might wish, it can produce arguments nevertheless that play up the medium’s capacity for susceptibility, and this can produce works that are dubiously assembled and categorical, or intricately woven and propositional. Michael Moore and Adam Curtis films  often flirt with the former, while Grimonprez, Chris Marker, the Straubs and Godard are more inclined to propose thought over asserting meaning.  It seeks out ironies and ambiguities as readily as investigative certitudes. Even though Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat implies that the Western powers were happy to be rid of Lumumba, the film is also interested in how the US managed to manipulate its black musicians to liaise with African leaders, all the while working alongside CIA operatives they had no idea were working so specifically for the American government, with Louis Armstrong leading other musicians in liaison missions with politicians from the continent across the Atlantic. There isn’t only, of course, the surreptitious irony of Armstrong and others being played by the American government, there is also the open irony of black American musicians who were not entirely free in their own country going to Africa and being expected to speak to people about the glories of the United States. As Malcolm X says, after being asked if he was on the lunatic fringe politically: ‘‘Any time that you have a country that refers to itself as the Free World and a democracy and at the same time has 22 million of its citizens who aren’t permitted citizenship, why that in itself reflects lunacy.’’ It might not be the easiest thing to represent the values of a free people when you aren’t one yourself, and are unaware that these freedoms have been further curtailed by operatives using you as a Mahogany Trojan horse. The very colour that would get Armstrong barred from restaurants and bars in the States is the very colour that allows him to be the representative of the US, while others can travel under his legitimising jurisdiction.
Yet it wouldn’t be fair to claim the film is an ironic work any more than it is an argumentative one, though both are features of its purpose, even if both are contained by a third: pathos. If in rhetoric Aristotle recognises three branches - logos, ethos and pathos - then one can see Grimonprez applying reason in juxtapositional suggestion; ethos in the irony often deployed, and pathos in the music that runs through the film, and gives aesthetic shape to arguments he proposes, and the ironies and ambiguities that come out of the predicament. Sure, the American government wants to get rid of Lumumba and show clearly who runs the Western world (logic), and sure, the film wants to leave us in no doubt the hypocrisy of a country that can speak of freedom without universalising it in their own country at the beginning of the sixties (ethos evident as irony). But it wants perhaps most of all to convince us affectively by music that makes us aware of the tragedy of a free Africa that is contained by the demands of Western (and on occasion Communist) interests, which leaves a continent’s emancipation stillborn.  Rather than saying categorically who killed Lumumba, it is chiefly interested in the tragedy of his death. If images can never convince as words can when it comes to making a categorical argument, then the combination of words, images and music can make for a dense amalgam of all three rhetorical devices, and deepen them by using the triad in its own way. Christina Zachariades says, ‘‘Soundtrack is classic Grimonprez in this way. Each of his films has the quality of being a dissertation and an indictment.’ (Filmmaker Magazine). But perhaps, more than any of his earlier films, Soundtrack...has an emotive force that brings together beautifully the death of a man and the death of an ideal: the dissertation and indictment combine with disillusionment on one continent, and a tragedy on another. It wants to work logic and ethos, but all the better to find a pathos that gives full credence to the film’s title.
We can notice this, for example, by contrasting it with the director’s early project, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. As Grimonprez explores various hijackings, the tone is harsh and assertive, scathingly ironic and explicitly insensitive. When we see a montage of planes crashing at the film’s conclusion, the soundtrack is peppy and blithe, as though we have all got used to atrocity, and anything on TV is but a form of entertainment. It is a brilliant work, though Zachariades’s remarks on Soundtrack... fit the earlier film more readily than they do here. It is a work of logic and ethos, exploring various skyjackings and plane crashes chiefly during the 70s, all the better to bring out the media’s fascination with the gruesome. It quotes extensively from Don DeLillo’s work, as he explores the question of terrorism and what we now call the attention economy. ‘Where before novelists made raids on people’s consciousness, now it is terrorists’ actions.’ How can a well-polished sentence capture the mind when the terrorist can capture hostages, and where, when the bomb goes off, ‘‘there is instantaneous worldwide attention’’? But Grimonperez may well wonder if all this hyperbolised attention-seeking leads to a diminishing of affect. It might have been Georg Simmel who first talked about the blasé attitude, saying ‘‘there is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook. It is at first the consequence of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their contrasts and from which it seems to us the intensification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived.’’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’) But move from the metropolis to the global village, and the attitude becomes many times multiplied, and the aloof registering of atrocity becomes both a necessary way of protecting one’s nerves, and yet a heightening of one’s curiosity. When that bomb goes off, it isn’t getting people’s attention because they are in immediate danger; it gets it partly because of the magnitude of the event as mediated experience. It is of more interest than anything else in the news that day.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Grimonprez offers a blasé attitude of his own. But Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y does feel like a work of its late post-modern moment, one that still could believe a critique with enough ironic force might just change the world. If we could put inverted commas around something and show a distance and disdain, we might be able to see through the cynicism with a healthy bout of our own. But instead of becoming epistemologically enlightened, one risks flirting with reverberative cynicism, one that leaves everything merely a system of signs, and it would be a sign of naivety if one were to take them affectively straight. In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Grimonperez raids the archives and finds gruesome footage of a Japanese terrorist offering a few final words before passing away, blood getting soaked up and swept up from an airport floor, a man’s arm blown off, and a tightrope walker falling to his death. Grimonperez is well aware that he needs to decontextualise this material that would have been headline news years earlier. However, the assumption the film makes is that since the media would constantly create emotional impact through broadcasting these atrocities, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y should remove the suspect feeling by flirting with no feeling at all. The music running through the film echoes the advertising that would have been apparent during the commercial breaks, as a viewer would, one minute, be asked to respond to a news event of great import and, moments later, wonder what cereal they should buy for breakfast. At the end of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the various planes we see crashing are accompanied by Van McCoy’s Do the Hustle, a pop song consistent with the sort of mid-to-late seventies TV shows people would be watching in their living rooms, like Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat. The music isn’t cynical, but the juxtaposition makes it so, as if Grimonprez wishes to make clear that if TV will cynically show atrocity for news ratings, then he will at least have the decency to distance himself from the footage by music/sound disjunction. How could he not, when he wants to comprehend the manifold hustles people were pulling off, as the terrorists well knew they were in a symbiotic relationship with the media? As the voiceover says, ‘’after killing you, they [the terrorists] would photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be used more effectively.’’
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y doesn’t quite share the media’s cynicism, but its distance risks exacerbating the aloofness, rather than alleviating it. It’s a consequence of a blasé attitude that needs to find a way of avoiding cynical sentimentality, as postmodernism would insist that manipulative sign systems mustn’t be taken straight. Grimonprez does a wonderful job of undermining those signs, but there is sometimes a potential insensitivity while doing so. These are real deaths, even if they are contained by mediated material, and when we see half a dozen crashes during the closing credits, we might find ourselves tapping our feet to the music as readily as feeling for those who died. Such a claim might sound like the sentimentalism Grimonprez is determined to avoid, but it is as though in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, he wanted to produce a work that would be as intellectually engaged as much of his earlier oeuvre (Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y; Double Take, Shadow World, Blue Orchid), yet with the emphasis not on an ethos and logic manifest as irony, but on pathos. When, near the end of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Grimonprez shows us footage of Lumumba captured by opposition forces, he offers Nina Simone singing The Ballad of Hollis Brown. There is no irony in this usage, but an escalating pathos that has been running steadily throughout the film. When shortly after Max Loach drum solos before Abby Lincoln comes in with searing lyrics, that we remember from the film’s beginning, Grimonprez has offered us a harrowing account of the white man’s burden as duplicitous indeed, with William A. M. Burden Jnr, US ambassador to Brussels, one of the figures busy manipulating behind the scenes to engineer Lumumba’s demise. With the Belgians considering the idea that Lumumba should be assassinated, Burden reckoned, “I don’t think it would be a bad idea, either. Lumumba was such a damn nuisance; it was perfectly obvious that the way to get rid of him was through political assassination.’’ The New York Review of Books quotes this passage when reviewing Grimponprez’s film and a couple of books on the subject, and uses the Burden quote shortly after another from CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles claims, ‘‘As far as I know, we don’t engage in assassinations and kidnappings and things of that kind. As far as I know, we never have. […] The idea that the CIA is always engaged in overthrowing governments that’s false. That’s for the birds.” Is this an instance where the US government’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or a sleight of hand trick evident in Dulles’s use of ‘as far as I know’ and ‘always’
What is at stake, of course, is geopolitics in a very immediate and very abstract sense. Lumumba was going to be in charge of a country at a moment in time when African nations’ independence was coinciding with the Cold War (an ongoing question in much of Grimonprez’s work, especially Double Take), and Lumumba was leaning towards Khrushchev’s Soviet Union for support. With Africa suddenly having various nations with a vote in the UN, this could balance political power in the direction of the Soviets. But also, the Congo had enormous mineral reserves, and the notion that this would no longer be accessible to the West led the Belgian government to privatise Union Minière days before independence. This made it clear the Congo wasn’t likely to be left to its own devices and, if it were, it would do so missing some of its vital resources. The white man’s burden that was really placed during the colonial era on the black man’s back, became in the post-colonial era the Burden of making sure the West meddled in Africa to make sure their financial interests were protected. Add to this a United States that still had segregation policies in the early sixties, with black musicians being used by the US government as tools in a propaganda war and an intelligence operation, and we have indeed a tangled web.
In DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, this web was no less entangled, but we can half-understand why it was more ironically played out. This wasn’t only Grimonprez’s blasé attitude towards the material; there was something in the material that demanded it. Terrorists using the media and the media using terrorism created a ferocious bad faith on both parts. This didn’t mean everyone involved only wanted to get their faces on screen, or cameras in people’s faces, but it was as though even those who were fighting for a very clear cause were caught in a mediated reality. When the Palestinians took their fight to the world, they were aware, after years of being ignored, that coinciding with celebrity culture might just put the Palestinians on the map, after Israel was busily deemed to be trying to wipe them off it. At a press conference, hijacker Adel-Abdel-Majid responds to a question about their actions killing a small child.  ‘’You said the death of a small child. I want to ask you about the death of 30 children of a school in Egypt, the death of about 70 human workers in Egypt, the death of people in Erbahir, the death of many human beings who have been killed and murdered, I could say, by the Israelis.’’ If it took murder and mayhem to get the word out that would counter Israeli propaganda, then that would be the price one needed to pay, and the media would be happy to buy when they could sell consumer terrorism to the public. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y isn’t only an ironic work. It is an ambiguous one, a slippery account that leaves neither the terrrorists nor the media looking so good, but at the same time recognising that at least the skyjackers were getting their beliefs aired, and, at least, the media reported it fully. In an interview from 2015, Grimonprez noted, You see in the eighties that the face of the hijacker disappears from television, and state terrorism and various state ideologies take over.’’ (Medium) The seventies approach may have been troublesome, but it wasn’t yet censorial.
In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the medium isn’t the message, as though Grimonprez is searching for a principle behind mediation without losing sight of the importance that, as an artist, he has for aesthetics and politics commingling. Speaking of Michael Hardt, Grimonprez takes a remark from the thinker and says, ’’’Machiavelli offers two alternatives. You can rule by fear, or you can rule by love.’ And the other option has hardly been explored. Because fear means the ruler is in control, because he can call control over the populace. But love is seated in the people, and that’s more volatile and shaky for the ruler.’’ (Medium) Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a work of love, as the Jazz and soul music that runs throughout the film provides a countervailing force to the mechanics of politics. Another way of looking at Hardt’s comments about Machiavelli is to view politics as a zero-sum game or an emotional multiplier. A political system based on power rests on an assumption that everybody who doesn’t have it wants it, and the person in power’s purpose is to make sure nobody else wrests it from them. This makes those around them useful or threatening, there to augment their power or undermine it. The zero-sum game rests on the belief that if anyone else gains any power, they will inevitably lose some of theirs, and power’s purpose is to stop this from happening. In the emotional multiplier, power becomes a self-generating force because power keeps multiplying its potential. In common parlance, we might call this delegation, but the term often suggests subordination that leaves others doing the bidding of power.
But what if delegation is closer to acknowledgement: that one delegates because others are much better at doing these other things? The risk is that the leader appears weak because they admit to superior qualities in others, but actually, it just means that the leader’s skill lies in delegation. They know that the multiplication of power is more important than the protection of their own. If Hardt says, What would it mean to have a political regime based on love?” (Johangrimonprez.be), perhaps Grimonprez’s answer would be one inflected with music based not on bombastic blood-thirsty national self-interest, like many an anthem, but on a universal awareness of grief and sorrow. It is impossible to say what sort of leader Lumumba would have become, and some might insist the chances are he would have eventually adopted repressive measures, like many an idealist who contains within them the ideologue: Castro, Ortega and Mugabe. After all, Hardt notes that ‘‘Machiavelli is posing two alternatives for the Prince. One is that people follow him because he is feared and the other is that people follow him because he is loved.’’ Machiavelli’s ‘‘conclusion is because the locus of fear, the source of fear resides in him (in the prince) and it can be constant for his rule. Whereas the locus of love resides in the people and therefore for him (the prince), it's not under his control.’’ (Johangrimonprez.be) In such a reckoning, any loss of individual power is diminished authority rather than a multiplication of power across the state. Zero-sum games trump emotional multipliers.
Whatever Lumumba’s rule would have been like, we can see in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat how much zero-sum thinking is central to many of the decisions made by those with power in the film. This is especially evident with the United States, and enormously so with Belgium, as well as the UK and, not a little, the Soviet Union, despite the agreeable persona that Nikita Khrushchev offers as he puckishly stands up to US imperial assumption. (Khrushchev shows up a lot in Grimonprez’s work.) The film says that while independence for African nations is all very well, that doesn’t mean the West believes they ought to have power over their resources, nor much of a say in the UN, despite their sudden collective power as each nation gains a vote in the assembly. And in turn, why should they have power even over the leaders they choose, if the financial interests are contrary to the West’s own? From a certain perspective, from pure self-interest, we might say the West was right, as the resources to be found in the Congo have proved ever more lucrative with nanotechnology and sustainable energy. But of course it has also left the Democratic Republic of Congo in a state of constant strife, with Grimonprez drawing together images of the iPhone advertising its great battery life, with battery of another form: 80,000 rapes in DRC since 1999. In between the images of iPhone adverts and the rape statistic, an intertitle tells us that the untapped mineral wealth of the DRC is estimated to be $24 trillion.
This returns us to our earlier point about inferential editing. Grimonprez isn’t quite saying that the rapes are directly linked to the money to be made in the country, but he is making clear they aren’t unconnected. We often hear that correlation is not causation, but film can often brilliantly propose juxtapositional correlations that might be deemed weak argumentation from a strictly analytic perspective, but strong argumentation from an emotional one. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying a film can manipulate us so much more easily than a text can, though that can often be a valid claim, and is all the more valid when a filmmaker wants to make a categorical argument that can seem all the more convincing because they have at their command sounds and images as well as words. However, if we are right to assume Grimonprez seeks argumentative inference over argumentative assertiveness, then we might assume that the meddling of the US and other countries in Africa has been financially lucrative for them, and often catastrophic for African nations. This needn’t make African nations innocent, but it certainly makes Western nations guilty.
The film’s purpose is to view Lumumba’s assassination as both original sin and sins of the past, a moment that showed Western nations weren’t willing to let go, and would just become so much more covert in their (post-) colonial ventures. It is partly why, at the beginning of the film, we hear a mercenary talking about his experiences. This isn’t the voice of the proud imperialist conquering territory for the glory of king and country, but a man reckoning with deeds that make little sense but, no doubt, a lot of money. "You travel across the world and get the best of everything. You basically live like a rockstar. But it comes with huge risks." (Mirror) So says, in a recent newspaper article, one British soldier turned mercenary, while Stop the War Coalition notes that a leading UK private military company’ has ‘senior executives and a board that is dominated by former military officers. ‘‘The chief executive of Aegis, for example, is former Gen Graham Binns, one-time commander of British troops in Basra.’’ The mercenary interviewed at the beginning of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat says that, while the first killing was hard, as you saw how final the act was, after that, he never quite felt the same again, even if he often remembered what it was like that first time. After you’ve killed one person, it becomes much easier: you become hardened and don’t give a damn. Later, another mercenary, a commander, is interviewed on his boat, saying it wasn’t difficult to overthrow an African government. Fifty well-trained men could do it, and he reckons he could get around a hundred within seven days. African nations might have been gaining their independence, but it wouldn’t take much to overthrow them if they weren’t to the liking of the West, which still had plenty of money at its disposal to protect its interests on the continent. No country’s assets were more precious than those in the Congo, and as Frantz Fanon says, quoted in the film, ‘‘if Africa is shaped like a revolver, then Congo is its trigger.’’
Thus, while it might have seemed like a great moment of liberation and no less a wonderful moment of democratic accountability, as African nations became independent and took a seat in the United Nations, this was only of much value if Western governments would accept the loss not only of territory but also of financial interests. They wouldn’t, so colonialism in a different form continued, but just more surreptitiously, as Grimonprez sees Lumumba’s assassination as the shift between open force that had been practised on weaker nations for centuries, and a power-play that couldn’t quite own up to its involvement. To this day, full responsibility hasn’t been acknowledged, though, ‘’in 2001, a Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry found that Belgium held ‘moral responsibility’ for Lumumba's assassination. The following year, the Belgian government formally apologised to both Lumumba's family and the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.’’ (Eastleigh Voice) But when we take into account the remark between the UK foreign secretary and Eisenhower, responsibility seemed manifold, a political version of Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Orient Express, where there were multiple killers all having a stab at the victim. Christie offered it literally, and we should be careful drawing analogies between an odious character in a thriller novel and an individual who wished to change the course of African history. But as with many political assassinations of the era, there seemed to be one victim, many culprits and few held culpable.
Grimonprez’s purpose is to disentangle as well as he can the various powers that had reason to wish Lumumba dead, and, of course, what makes it still more tragic is the number of people who very much saw in Lumumba and the African continent great hope, being used nefariously by the CIA. Grimonprez could have offered this cynically, seeing this was the way politics was being done in a post-colonial world. Instead, it becomes a lament to a lost opportunity and what in many became a lost continent. It is one that can still be plundered by various interested parties, but also one that is of little interest to the media except as a homogenised crisis zone. The great African writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene insisted, ‘‘We don’t have one African culture – we have a myriad of cultures. What we have is many cultures in a melting pot that will generate a new culture.’’ (Socialist Worker) However, this variety is usually flattened into images of a continent in chaos, of coups and famines, of starving children and civil wars: From Biafra to Sudan, Ethiopia, to Somalia, from Congo to Niger. These crises have all taken place since World War II, and no doubt some will claim this is what happens when Western know-how leaves a continent to its own devices. But the combination of Western meddling in the present and Western influence in the past suggests that the West never really went away. Ryszard Kapuscinski, in a fine book on Africa, speaks of one of its most notorious dictators, Idi Amin. ‘‘Amin’s support was the army, which he created according to the colonial model, the only one he knew.’’ (The Shadow of the Sun) One might insist that the paradox of Africa’s resource wealth and economic poverty rests on the brutal leaders who take power. As if this will explain that while ‘’A’frica has the richest concentration of natural resources such as oil, copper, diamonds, bauxite, lithium, gold, hardwood forests, and tropical fruits. It is estimated that 30% of the earth’s mineral resources are found in the African continent’’ (World Atlas), the continent is nevertheless ‘‘the poorest continent according to GDP per capita.’’ (World Atlas) But a more plausible explanation rests elsewhere. Rose Cherneva reckons, ‘‘the main problem to Africa’s economic development comes from multinational corporations that benefit from slave labour and commercial exploitation. Kwame Nkrumah was right to say that globalisation and capitalism in the post-colonial era only brought dependence and financial obligation towards the neocolonialist nations like Britain, France, Belgium and the USA.’’ (Medium)
When Grimonprez shows us footage from an Apple ad, this can seem a gratuitous proleptic leap, but it is also part of the broader tragedy that he wants to reveal, and to which the music has consistently alluded. If great swathes of Africa’s populations are seen as a ‘swarm’, an ‘invasion, ‘a threat’ and ‘an influx’ into Europe, then this visible migration is met by another form of escape, much more surreptitiously manifest. Firoze Manji and Pablo Yangua state, ‘‘According to a 2014 report, Africa receives about $133.7 billion each year from official aid, grants, loans to the private sector, remittances, etc. But at the same time, some $191.9 billion is extracted from the continent in the form of debt repayments, multinational company profits, illicit financial flows, brain drain, illegal logging and fishing etc.’’ (New Internationalist) They observe that ‘’more recent figures put the outflow much higher – at over $218 billion. In other words, Africa suffers a net loss of more than $85 billion every year. Such a net outflow suggests that far from the West aiding Africa, it is Africa that is aiding the West.’’ (New Internationalist)
Are we beginning to put words into the filmmaker’s mouth? A potentially intriguing idiomatic phrase in the context of a cinema we have proposed is interested in putting images into people’s minds with the minimum amount of words, and that relies often more on inference than statement. At one moment, Grimonprez cuts from Nina Simone singing, followed by footage of Lumumba having his mouth stuffed while tied up on the back of an open truck, and shows, too, the United Nations voting for a declaration against colonialism, where Belgium and the US abstained. The implication is that colonialism was likely to continue, as Grimonprez gives us footage of homeless masses and talk of genocides, before cutting to the Apple ad, followed by the insert about $24 trillion of untapped deposits in the Democratic Republic of Congo. From an argumentative point of view, this can seem scattered, as we have footage of Simone, images and words from the United Nations, then footage of African people without homes, and footage also from the Apple ad.
But from another perspective, this is what films do so well, as if the limitations in logical argument allow for a sensuously developed one in filmic form. The best essay films are rarely polemics, as though understanding that cinema is a slippery method for argumentative assertiveness. While Kevin MacDonald (in One Day in September), Michael Moore (in Fahrenheit 9/11) and Adam Curtis (in The Power of Nightmares) can use footage to make a categorical point, and do it with various degrees of brilliance, Grimonprez seems closer to a quizzical work, exemplified by Chris Marker, if we think of a scene in Letter from Siberia, where Marker shows the same footage with a different voice over. In one, there is the oppressed worker, in the other, the liberated worker devoted to their country. Images can be spun many ways, and one can see that the slipperiness of film and its inferential nature can lead to a weak argument, or see it as a great opportunity to create arguments that the viewer partly puts together in their head.
If the filmmaker too categorically does so, the risk is weak argumentation and propaganda, over-suggestive thought and free thinking. Few but the already prejudiced would come away from Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat believing that Lumumba deserved his fate, but one might comprehend the reason why, within a certain capitalist logic that was about protecting resources over freeing nations, that Lumumba was unrealistic in his aims. That doesn’t at all mean he was wrong. Of course not. But it does complicate the notion that Lumumba was a martyr and the US, Belgium and Britain were evil. Such a bald dichotomy may have a lot of truth to it, but it would also simplify what truth is, which is often a manifold attempt at comprehending a given situation. One comes away from Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, unequivocal and ambivalent simultaneously. We may unequivocally believe that Lumumba was taken out as a political interference, yet also understand that the power and force required to extract resources from nations that had made their own countries rich on the basis of them was going to be much greater than simply the presence of a liberated people.
Nevertheless, any ambivalence one feels is quite distinct from irony, if both ambiguity and irony share a dichotomous dimension. After all, ambiguity indicates more than one response, just as irony proposes more than one meaning. But the risk with irony is that it leaves one aloof, and few watching the marvellous Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y will likely be moved by the conclusion. It ironically explores a moment when terrorism and media were symbiotically relying on each other for sensationalism. The terror organisations needed the publicity; the media needed the ratings. In the new film, this is not so. Instead of complicity, the film shows duplicity, with many blacks the victims of the immediate impact of post-colonial meddling. ‘‘That moment in time is actually the ground zero of the West for the neocolonial grab of the resources in the African continent,’’ Grimonprez says. ‘’It is a ‘scramble for Africa’ again, because of its resources.’’ (Brussels Times) While Lumumba lost his life, a number of black American musicians lost whatever faith they had in American goodwill and fairness as they were used by the CIA. Some were more cognizant of it than others, but many were aware enough of the manipulations to feel disgusted by the country. Simone nicknamed it The ‘United Snakes of America’ (The Nation) and, though Maithe Chini reckons the film possesses a ‘’heavy dose of irony’’ (Brussels Times), that surely describes some of Grimonprez’s earlier work more readily than it does Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. It is as if the soundtrack to the film is a hymn to possibilities that were so incipiently in the music, and so completely absent from the politics. It creates a wonderfully disjunctive sadness that to define it as ironic would undermine the affect Grimonprez surely seeks. It looks back on an era that was full of hope and leaps forward to register the depth of the subsequent hopelessness, all the while using the music of Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbie Lincoln, Louis Armstrong, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and others to propose that while it might be very hard to remain optimistic in the face of such mendacity and manipulation down the years, the music nevertheless contains the promise of the possible, the love rather than the power Hardt discusses, and that Grimonprez surely believes in.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

A River of Crocodiles

Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a marvellously slippery account of events surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. It manages to arrive at truths without simply relying on facts, even if they are central to the exploration. The film may well implicate the CIA, may well make clear that great black musicians were used by the intelligence agency, creating covert opportunities to destabilise African governments at a time when many nations in the region were becoming independent. But it does so with a constant awareness that truth and facts aren’t quite one and the same, as we will later explain using ancient notions of rhetoric, ethos and pathos.
It is, in the best sense of the term, an essay film, and yet though Grimonprez is credited as writer/director, the work is very different from many an essayistic documentary that, while made up chiefly of images, is also written. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a film written in the editing suite. This might seem to be so with many a documentary forgoing voiceover. However, such works rarely fall under the term essay film. Works by the Masyles brothers like Salesman, Leacock’s Primary or Frederick Wiseman’s High School, don’t essay – they observe, scrutinising the material recorded, all the better to get the viewer to look with the same observational acuity. When we watch the bible salesman Paul Brennan struggling not just to sell Bibles but with his life more generally, much of this must be implicitly understood. We may discover, elsewhere, that he was separating from his wife and had a serious drink problem, but there is nothing in the film, no voiceover, for example, informing us that this is the case.
Grimonprez’s film is very far from such observational work, but it is as though he asks of the essay film an implicit comprehension equal to the Maysles’s and co, yet does so with the emphasis on montage over, if not the long take, at least the non-juxtapositional one. When the Maysles cut from a figure in the salesman’s firm offering a motivational speech to the various salesmen looking on, we might wonder what is on their minds as we see their faces, but these are shots that chiefly remain contained by the specifics of mise en scene. A juxtapositional documentary can arrive at the essayistic by resisting the fidelity to screen space, yet without feeling obliged to use voiceover narration. Few recent examples do it better than Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.
It does, of course, rely on language as the film is punctuated with various quotes and statements, often with accompanying dates, and that could, in other circumstances, be part of a Powerpoint presentation. One of the first is from President Eisenhower, who ‘‘expresses his wish that the Congolese president would fall into a river of crocodiles.’’ It is a remark dated Washington, September 19th, 1960, and establishes promptly what the film will be about: that though during the post-war years, African nations were gaining their independence, this didn’t mean Western powers were going to allow them to become too big for their boots. Especially when, for so long, US and European interests had been fillings theirs with African booty. Lumumba was far from the only or even the first African post-war figure to insist that the resources were theirs: Nasser, after all, gave the British a bloody nose over Suez. But he would become the most conspicuous one when it came to realising that just because the West no longer had colonial authority, that didn’t mean African nations would be free to choose whoever they liked as their leader. The film shows implicitly what happens when they try. The Eisenhower remark comes up first, and then, seconds later, Grimonprez adds to the same intertitle,’’ the British foreign minister’s response, ‘‘regretfully, we’ve lost the techniques of old-fashioned diplomacy.’’ Just seconds of screen time after this, another intertitle comes up. It is by Maya Angelou from the following year: Our brother Lumumba has been killed in the Congo.’’ That potentially jocular exchange between Eisenhower and the UK carries the force of criminal intent: British and American powers talk about Lumumba’s death; less than a year afterwards, he is assassinated.
Some analytically inclined film theorists have concluded that film cannot do philosophy because it lacks the grammar for argument. Paisley Livingston believes, ‘’Although it may be plausible to report that an experience of a work's montage or motion picture style has given rise to a vivid, visually mediated recollection of some previously known philosophical thought, it is fair to ask whether such appeals to experience can offer good grounds for believing that a significantly new idea or argument has emerged.’’ (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism) Yet one may instead argue that it does philosophy in a different way due to grammatical differences, rather than that philosophy offers discursive prose. An image doesn’t have a tense, and even those put together have them only because of the presumption the viewer will make between one shot and the next. When a writer says the person went down the street and into the shop, the cause and effects are clear. When a filmmaker cuts between a person walking along the pavement and then going into a store, it only appears to be. It is partly why we have the term creative geography, as Lev Kuleshov showed that time and space are often united in the viewer’s mind, rather than features of the images themselves. Kuleshov illustrates this when showing that characters would be looking out onto a field of poles, but the poles and the characters were in different parts of Moscow. The viewer, however, assumes they occupy the same immediate environment. Equally, when a character walks along the road, and the next shot shows him going into a cafe, the viewer will assume that the time and space are coherent, even if the street is in New York, but the cafe is in Toronto. The film might choose to retain this impression (many films use Toronto to double as New York), or to counter it, all the better to wrong-foot the viewer diegetically or non-diegetically. It can become an aspect of the story or an aspect of the form, with someone only looking as though they are still in New York, but, between the two shots, there has been an ellipsis, as we then realise the character is in a different city. Equally, it can be a formal device never explained and only utilised. This can happen when we are reduced to wondering if we are witnessing a continuity error or a transition, and left in a state of constructive ambiguity concerning the status of the image.
Godard would sometimes do this(in Slow Motion, for example), and another good example comes from Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours. The central character says she is going out, and the film cuts to her and her friends arriving at a party. Yet the clothes she wears are different from those she was wearing when she announced she was going out, and the assumptions we have about form as filmic cause and effect (going out and then arriving at a destination) is countered by the clothing that says time has passed – a day, week or a month, we cannot say. Pialat may be less radical with the form than Godard often is, but he can create forceful ambiguities out of insisting we don’t fall too easily into cause-and-effect assumptions.
The upshot of this is that film is a great medium of argumentative inference rather than argumentative insistence, and if it can’t quite do philosophy as many an analytic thinker might wish, it can produce arguments nevertheless that play up the medium’s capacity for susceptibility, and this can produce works that are dubiously assembled and categorical, or intricately woven and propositional. Michael Moore and Adam Curtis films  often flirt with the former, while Grimonprez, Chris Marker, the Straubs and Godard are more inclined to propose thought over asserting meaning.  It seeks out ironies and ambiguities as readily as investigative certitudes. Even though Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat implies that the Western powers were happy to be rid of Lumumba, the film is also interested in how the US managed to manipulate its black musicians to liaise with African leaders, all the while working alongside CIA operatives they had no idea were working so specifically for the American government, with Louis Armstrong leading other musicians in liaison missions with politicians from the continent across the Atlantic. There isn’t only, of course, the surreptitious irony of Armstrong and others being played by the American government, there is also the open irony of black American musicians who were not entirely free in their own country going to Africa and being expected to speak to people about the glories of the United States. As Malcolm X says, after being asked if he was on the lunatic fringe politically: ‘‘Any time that you have a country that refers to itself as the Free World and a democracy and at the same time has 22 million of its citizens who aren’t permitted citizenship, why that in itself reflects lunacy.’’ It might not be the easiest thing to represent the values of a free people when you aren’t one yourself, and are unaware that these freedoms have been further curtailed by operatives using you as a Mahogany Trojan horse. The very colour that would get Armstrong barred from restaurants and bars in the States is the very colour that allows him to be the representative of the US, while others can travel under his legitimising jurisdiction.
Yet it wouldn’t be fair to claim the film is an ironic work any more than it is an argumentative one, though both are features of its purpose, even if both are contained by a third: pathos. If in rhetoric Aristotle recognises three branches - logos, ethos and pathos - then one can see Grimonprez applying reason in juxtapositional suggestion; ethos in the irony often deployed, and pathos in the music that runs through the film, and gives aesthetic shape to arguments he proposes, and the ironies and ambiguities that come out of the predicament. Sure, the American government wants to get rid of Lumumba and show clearly who runs the Western world (logic), and sure, the film wants to leave us in no doubt the hypocrisy of a country that can speak of freedom without universalising it in their own country at the beginning of the sixties (ethos evident as irony). But it wants perhaps most of all to convince us affectively by music that makes us aware of the tragedy of a free Africa that is contained by the demands of Western (and on occasion Communist) interests, which leaves a continent’s emancipation stillborn.  Rather than saying categorically who killed Lumumba, it is chiefly interested in the tragedy of his death. If images can never convince as words can when it comes to making a categorical argument, then the combination of words, images and music can make for a dense amalgam of all three rhetorical devices, and deepen them by using the triad in its own way. Christina Zachariades says, ‘‘Soundtrack is classic Grimonprez in this way. Each of his films has the quality of being a dissertation and an indictment.’ (Filmmaker Magazine). But perhaps, more than any of his earlier films, Soundtrack...has an emotive force that brings together beautifully the death of a man and the death of an ideal: the dissertation and indictment combine with disillusionment on one continent, and a tragedy on another. It wants to work logic and ethos, but all the better to find a pathos that gives full credence to the film’s title.
We can notice this, for example, by contrasting it with the director’s early project, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. As Grimonprez explores various hijackings, the tone is harsh and assertive, scathingly ironic and explicitly insensitive. When we see a montage of planes crashing at the film’s conclusion, the soundtrack is peppy and blithe, as though we have all got used to atrocity, and anything on TV is but a form of entertainment. It is a brilliant work, though Zachariades’s remarks on Soundtrack... fit the earlier film more readily than they do here. It is a work of logic and ethos, exploring various skyjackings and plane crashes chiefly during the 70s, all the better to bring out the media’s fascination with the gruesome. It quotes extensively from Don DeLillo’s work, as he explores the question of terrorism and what we now call the attention economy. ‘Where before novelists made raids on people’s consciousness, now it is terrorists’ actions.’ How can a well-polished sentence capture the mind when the terrorist can capture hostages, and where, when the bomb goes off, ‘‘there is instantaneous worldwide attention’’? But Grimonperez may well wonder if all this hyperbolised attention-seeking leads to a diminishing of affect. It might have been Georg Simmel who first talked about the blasé attitude, saying ‘‘there is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook. It is at first the consequence of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their contrasts and from which it seems to us the intensification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived.’’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’) But move from the metropolis to the global village, and the attitude becomes many times multiplied, and the aloof registering of atrocity becomes both a necessary way of protecting one’s nerves, and yet a heightening of one’s curiosity. When that bomb goes off, it isn’t getting people’s attention because they are in immediate danger; it gets it partly because of the magnitude of the event as mediated experience. It is of more interest than anything else in the news that day.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Grimonprez offers a blasé attitude of his own. But Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y does feel like a work of its late post-modern moment, one that still could believe a critique with enough ironic force might just change the world. If we could put inverted commas around something and show a distance and disdain, we might be able to see through the cynicism with a healthy bout of our own. But instead of becoming epistemologically enlightened, one risks flirting with reverberative cynicism, one that leaves everything merely a system of signs, and it would be a sign of naivety if one were to take them affectively straight. In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Grimonperez raids the archives and finds gruesome footage of a Japanese terrorist offering a few final words before passing away, blood getting soaked up and swept up from an airport floor, a man’s arm blown off, and a tightrope walker falling to his death. Grimonperez is well aware that he needs to decontextualise this material that would have been headline news years earlier. However, the assumption the film makes is that since the media would constantly create emotional impact through broadcasting these atrocities, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y should remove the suspect feeling by flirting with no feeling at all. The music running through the film echoes the advertising that would have been apparent during the commercial breaks, as a viewer would, one minute, be asked to respond to a news event of great import and, moments later, wonder what cereal they should buy for breakfast. At the end of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the various planes we see crashing are accompanied by Van McCoy’s Do the Hustle, a pop song consistent with the sort of mid-to-late seventies TV shows people would be watching in their living rooms, like Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat. The music isn’t cynical, but the juxtaposition makes it so, as if Grimonprez wishes to make clear that if TV will cynically show atrocity for news ratings, then he will at least have the decency to distance himself from the footage by music/sound disjunction. How could he not, when he wants to comprehend the manifold hustles people were pulling off, as the terrorists well knew they were in a symbiotic relationship with the media? As the voiceover says, ‘’after killing you, they [the terrorists] would photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be used more effectively.’’
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y doesn’t quite share the media’s cynicism, but its distance risks exacerbating the aloofness, rather than alleviating it. It’s a consequence of a blasé attitude that needs to find a way of avoiding cynical sentimentality, as postmodernism would insist that manipulative sign systems mustn’t be taken straight. Grimonprez does a wonderful job of undermining those signs, but there is sometimes a potential insensitivity while doing so. These are real deaths, even if they are contained by mediated material, and when we see half a dozen crashes during the closing credits, we might find ourselves tapping our feet to the music as readily as feeling for those who died. Such a claim might sound like the sentimentalism Grimonprez is determined to avoid, but it is as though in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, he wanted to produce a work that would be as intellectually engaged as much of his earlier oeuvre (Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y; Double Take, Shadow World, Blue Orchid), yet with the emphasis not on an ethos and logic manifest as irony, but on pathos. When, near the end of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Grimonprez shows us footage of Lumumba captured by opposition forces, he offers Nina Simone singing The Ballad of Hollis Brown. There is no irony in this usage, but an escalating pathos that has been running steadily throughout the film. When shortly after Max Loach drum solos before Abby Lincoln comes in with searing lyrics, that we remember from the film’s beginning, Grimonprez has offered us a harrowing account of the white man’s burden as duplicitous indeed, with William A. M. Burden Jnr, US ambassador to Brussels, one of the figures busy manipulating behind the scenes to engineer Lumumba’s demise. With the Belgians considering the idea that Lumumba should be assassinated, Burden reckoned, “I don’t think it would be a bad idea, either. Lumumba was such a damn nuisance; it was perfectly obvious that the way to get rid of him was through political assassination.’’ The New York Review of Books quotes this passage when reviewing Grimponprez’s film and a couple of books on the subject, and uses the Burden quote shortly after another from CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles claims, ‘‘As far as I know, we don’t engage in assassinations and kidnappings and things of that kind. As far as I know, we never have. […] The idea that the CIA is always engaged in overthrowing governments that’s false. That’s for the birds.” Is this an instance where the US government’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or a sleight of hand trick evident in Dulles’s use of ‘as far as I know’ and ‘always’
What is at stake, of course, is geopolitics in a very immediate and very abstract sense. Lumumba was going to be in charge of a country at a moment in time when African nations’ independence was coinciding with the Cold War (an ongoing question in much of Grimonprez’s work, especially Double Take), and Lumumba was leaning towards Khrushchev’s Soviet Union for support. With Africa suddenly having various nations with a vote in the UN, this could balance political power in the direction of the Soviets. But also, the Congo had enormous mineral reserves, and the notion that this would no longer be accessible to the West led the Belgian government to privatise Union Minière days before independence. This made it clear the Congo wasn’t likely to be left to its own devices and, if it were, it would do so missing some of its vital resources. The white man’s burden that was really placed during the colonial era on the black man’s back, became in the post-colonial era the Burden of making sure the West meddled in Africa to make sure their financial interests were protected. Add to this a United States that still had segregation policies in the early sixties, with black musicians being used by the US government as tools in a propaganda war and an intelligence operation, and we have indeed a tangled web.
In DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, this web was no less entangled, but we can half-understand why it was more ironically played out. This wasn’t only Grimonprez’s blasé attitude towards the material; there was something in the material that demanded it. Terrorists using the media and the media using terrorism created a ferocious bad faith on both parts. This didn’t mean everyone involved only wanted to get their faces on screen, or cameras in people’s faces, but it was as though even those who were fighting for a very clear cause were caught in a mediated reality. When the Palestinians took their fight to the world, they were aware, after years of being ignored, that coinciding with celebrity culture might just put the Palestinians on the map, after Israel was busily deemed to be trying to wipe them off it. At a press conference, hijacker Adel-Abdel-Majid responds to a question about their actions killing a small child.  ‘’You said the death of a small child. I want to ask you about the death of 30 children of a school in Egypt, the death of about 70 human workers in Egypt, the death of people in Erbahir, the death of many human beings who have been killed and murdered, I could say, by the Israelis.’’ If it took murder and mayhem to get the word out that would counter Israeli propaganda, then that would be the price one needed to pay, and the media would be happy to buy when they could sell consumer terrorism to the public. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y isn’t only an ironic work. It is an ambiguous one, a slippery account that leaves neither the terrrorists nor the media looking so good, but at the same time recognising that at least the skyjackers were getting their beliefs aired, and, at least, the media reported it fully. In an interview from 2015, Grimonprez noted, You see in the eighties that the face of the hijacker disappears from television, and state terrorism and various state ideologies take over.’’ (Medium) The seventies approach may have been troublesome, but it wasn’t yet censorial.
In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the medium isn’t the message, as though Grimonprez is searching for a principle behind mediation without losing sight of the importance that, as an artist, he has for aesthetics and politics commingling. Speaking of Michael Hardt, Grimonprez takes a remark from the thinker and says, ’’’Machiavelli offers two alternatives. You can rule by fear, or you can rule by love.’ And the other option has hardly been explored. Because fear means the ruler is in control, because he can call control over the populace. But love is seated in the people, and that’s more volatile and shaky for the ruler.’’ (Medium) Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a work of love, as the Jazz and soul music that runs throughout the film provides a countervailing force to the mechanics of politics. Another way of looking at Hardt’s comments about Machiavelli is to view politics as a zero-sum game or an emotional multiplier. A political system based on power rests on an assumption that everybody who doesn’t have it wants it, and the person in power’s purpose is to make sure nobody else wrests it from them. This makes those around them useful or threatening, there to augment their power or undermine it. The zero-sum game rests on the belief that if anyone else gains any power, they will inevitably lose some of theirs, and power’s purpose is to stop this from happening. In the emotional multiplier, power becomes a self-generating force because power keeps multiplying its potential. In common parlance, we might call this delegation, but the term often suggests subordination that leaves others doing the bidding of power.
But what if delegation is closer to acknowledgement: that one delegates because others are much better at doing these other things? The risk is that the leader appears weak because they admit to superior qualities in others, but actually, it just means that the leader’s skill lies in delegation. They know that the multiplication of power is more important than the protection of their own. If Hardt says, What would it mean to have a political regime based on love?” (Johangrimonprez.be), perhaps Grimonprez’s answer would be one inflected with music based not on bombastic blood-thirsty national self-interest, like many an anthem, but on a universal awareness of grief and sorrow. It is impossible to say what sort of leader Lumumba would have become, and some might insist the chances are he would have eventually adopted repressive measures, like many an idealist who contains within them the ideologue: Castro, Ortega and Mugabe. After all, Hardt notes that ‘‘Machiavelli is posing two alternatives for the Prince. One is that people follow him because he is feared and the other is that people follow him because he is loved.’’ Machiavelli’s ‘‘conclusion is because the locus of fear, the source of fear resides in him (in the prince) and it can be constant for his rule. Whereas the locus of love resides in the people and therefore for him (the prince), it's not under his control.’’ (Johangrimonprez.be) In such a reckoning, any loss of individual power is diminished authority rather than a multiplication of power across the state. Zero-sum games trump emotional multipliers.
Whatever Lumumba’s rule would have been like, we can see in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat how much zero-sum thinking is central to many of the decisions made by those with power in the film. This is especially evident with the United States, and enormously so with Belgium, as well as the UK and, not a little, the Soviet Union, despite the agreeable persona that Nikita Khrushchev offers as he puckishly stands up to US imperial assumption. (Khrushchev shows up a lot in Grimonprez’s work.) The film says that while independence for African nations is all very well, that doesn’t mean the West believes they ought to have power over their resources, nor much of a say in the UN, despite their sudden collective power as each nation gains a vote in the assembly. And in turn, why should they have power even over the leaders they choose, if the financial interests are contrary to the West’s own? From a certain perspective, from pure self-interest, we might say the West was right, as the resources to be found in the Congo have proved ever more lucrative with nanotechnology and sustainable energy. But of course it has also left the Democratic Republic of Congo in a state of constant strife, with Grimonprez drawing together images of the iPhone advertising its great battery life, with battery of another form: 80,000 rapes in DRC since 1999. In between the images of iPhone adverts and the rape statistic, an intertitle tells us that the untapped mineral wealth of the DRC is estimated to be $24 trillion.
This returns us to our earlier point about inferential editing. Grimonprez isn’t quite saying that the rapes are directly linked to the money to be made in the country, but he is making clear they aren’t unconnected. We often hear that correlation is not causation, but film can often brilliantly propose juxtapositional correlations that might be deemed weak argumentation from a strictly analytic perspective, but strong argumentation from an emotional one. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying a film can manipulate us so much more easily than a text can, though that can often be a valid claim, and is all the more valid when a filmmaker wants to make a categorical argument that can seem all the more convincing because they have at their command sounds and images as well as words. However, if we are right to assume Grimonprez seeks argumentative inference over argumentative assertiveness, then we might assume that the meddling of the US and other countries in Africa has been financially lucrative for them, and often catastrophic for African nations. This needn’t make African nations innocent, but it certainly makes Western nations guilty.
The film’s purpose is to view Lumumba’s assassination as both original sin and sins of the past, a moment that showed Western nations weren’t willing to let go, and would just become so much more covert in their (post-) colonial ventures. It is partly why, at the beginning of the film, we hear a mercenary talking about his experiences. This isn’t the voice of the proud imperialist conquering territory for the glory of king and country, but a man reckoning with deeds that make little sense but, no doubt, a lot of money. "You travel across the world and get the best of everything. You basically live like a rockstar. But it comes with huge risks." (Mirror) So says, in a recent newspaper article, one British soldier turned mercenary, while Stop the War Coalition notes that a leading UK private military company’ has ‘senior executives and a board that is dominated by former military officers. ‘‘The chief executive of Aegis, for example, is former Gen Graham Binns, one-time commander of British troops in Basra.’’ The mercenary interviewed at the beginning of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat says that, while the first killing was hard, as you saw how final the act was, after that, he never quite felt the same again, even if he often remembered what it was like that first time. After you’ve killed one person, it becomes much easier: you become hardened and don’t give a damn. Later, another mercenary, a commander, is interviewed on his boat, saying it wasn’t difficult to overthrow an African government. Fifty well-trained men could do it, and he reckons he could get around a hundred within seven days. African nations might have been gaining their independence, but it wouldn’t take much to overthrow them if they weren’t to the liking of the West, which still had plenty of money at its disposal to protect its interests on the continent. No country’s assets were more precious than those in the Congo, and as Frantz Fanon says, quoted in the film, ‘‘if Africa is shaped like a revolver, then Congo is its trigger.’’
Thus, while it might have seemed like a great moment of liberation and no less a wonderful moment of democratic accountability, as African nations became independent and took a seat in the United Nations, this was only of much value if Western governments would accept the loss not only of territory but also of financial interests. They wouldn’t, so colonialism in a different form continued, but just more surreptitiously, as Grimonprez sees Lumumba’s assassination as the shift between open force that had been practised on weaker nations for centuries, and a power-play that couldn’t quite own up to its involvement. To this day, full responsibility hasn’t been acknowledged, though, ‘’in 2001, a Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry found that Belgium held ‘moral responsibility’ for Lumumba's assassination. The following year, the Belgian government formally apologised to both Lumumba's family and the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.’’ (Eastleigh Voice) But when we take into account the remark between the UK foreign secretary and Eisenhower, responsibility seemed manifold, a political version of Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Orient Express, where there were multiple killers all having a stab at the victim. Christie offered it literally, and we should be careful drawing analogies between an odious character in a thriller novel and an individual who wished to change the course of African history. But as with many political assassinations of the era, there seemed to be one victim, many culprits and few held culpable.
Grimonprez’s purpose is to disentangle as well as he can the various powers that had reason to wish Lumumba dead, and, of course, what makes it still more tragic is the number of people who very much saw in Lumumba and the African continent great hope, being used nefariously by the CIA. Grimonprez could have offered this cynically, seeing this was the way politics was being done in a post-colonial world. Instead, it becomes a lament to a lost opportunity and what in many became a lost continent. It is one that can still be plundered by various interested parties, but also one that is of little interest to the media except as a homogenised crisis zone. The great African writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene insisted, ‘‘We don’t have one African culture – we have a myriad of cultures. What we have is many cultures in a melting pot that will generate a new culture.’’ (Socialist Worker) However, this variety is usually flattened into images of a continent in chaos, of coups and famines, of starving children and civil wars: From Biafra to Sudan, Ethiopia, to Somalia, from Congo to Niger. These crises have all taken place since World War II, and no doubt some will claim this is what happens when Western know-how leaves a continent to its own devices. But the combination of Western meddling in the present and Western influence in the past suggests that the West never really went away. Ryszard Kapuscinski, in a fine book on Africa, speaks of one of its most notorious dictators, Idi Amin. ‘‘Amin’s support was the army, which he created according to the colonial model, the only one he knew.’’ (The Shadow of the Sun) One might insist that the paradox of Africa’s resource wealth and economic poverty rests on the brutal leaders who take power. As if this will explain that while ‘’A’frica has the richest concentration of natural resources such as oil, copper, diamonds, bauxite, lithium, gold, hardwood forests, and tropical fruits. It is estimated that 30% of the earth’s mineral resources are found in the African continent’’ (World Atlas), the continent is nevertheless ‘‘the poorest continent according to GDP per capita.’’ (World Atlas) But a more plausible explanation rests elsewhere. Rose Cherneva reckons, ‘‘the main problem to Africa’s economic development comes from multinational corporations that benefit from slave labour and commercial exploitation. Kwame Nkrumah was right to say that globalisation and capitalism in the post-colonial era only brought dependence and financial obligation towards the neocolonialist nations like Britain, France, Belgium and the USA.’’ (Medium)
When Grimonprez shows us footage from an Apple ad, this can seem a gratuitous proleptic leap, but it is also part of the broader tragedy that he wants to reveal, and to which the music has consistently alluded. If great swathes of Africa’s populations are seen as a ‘swarm’, an ‘invasion, ‘a threat’ and ‘an influx’ into Europe, then this visible migration is met by another form of escape, much more surreptitiously manifest. Firoze Manji and Pablo Yangua state, ‘‘According to a 2014 report, Africa receives about $133.7 billion each year from official aid, grants, loans to the private sector, remittances, etc. But at the same time, some $191.9 billion is extracted from the continent in the form of debt repayments, multinational company profits, illicit financial flows, brain drain, illegal logging and fishing etc.’’ (New Internationalist) They observe that ‘’more recent figures put the outflow much higher – at over $218 billion. In other words, Africa suffers a net loss of more than $85 billion every year. Such a net outflow suggests that far from the West aiding Africa, it is Africa that is aiding the West.’’ (New Internationalist)
Are we beginning to put words into the filmmaker’s mouth? A potentially intriguing idiomatic phrase in the context of a cinema we have proposed is interested in putting images into people’s minds with the minimum amount of words, and that relies often more on inference than statement. At one moment, Grimonprez cuts from Nina Simone singing, followed by footage of Lumumba having his mouth stuffed while tied up on the back of an open truck, and shows, too, the United Nations voting for a declaration against colonialism, where Belgium and the US abstained. The implication is that colonialism was likely to continue, as Grimonprez gives us footage of homeless masses and talk of genocides, before cutting to the Apple ad, followed by the insert about $24 trillion of untapped deposits in the Democratic Republic of Congo. From an argumentative point of view, this can seem scattered, as we have footage of Simone, images and words from the United Nations, then footage of African people without homes, and footage also from the Apple ad.
But from another perspective, this is what films do so well, as if the limitations in logical argument allow for a sensuously developed one in filmic form. The best essay films are rarely polemics, as though understanding that cinema is a slippery method for argumentative assertiveness. While Kevin MacDonald (in One Day in September), Michael Moore (in Fahrenheit 9/11) and Adam Curtis (in The Power of Nightmares) can use footage to make a categorical point, and do it with various degrees of brilliance, Grimonprez seems closer to a quizzical work, exemplified by Chris Marker, if we think of a scene in Letter from Siberia, where Marker shows the same footage with a different voice over. In one, there is the oppressed worker, in the other, the liberated worker devoted to their country. Images can be spun many ways, and one can see that the slipperiness of film and its inferential nature can lead to a weak argument, or see it as a great opportunity to create arguments that the viewer partly puts together in their head.
If the filmmaker too categorically does so, the risk is weak argumentation and propaganda, over-suggestive thought and free thinking. Few but the already prejudiced would come away from Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat believing that Lumumba deserved his fate, but one might comprehend the reason why, within a certain capitalist logic that was about protecting resources over freeing nations, that Lumumba was unrealistic in his aims. That doesn’t at all mean he was wrong. Of course not. But it does complicate the notion that Lumumba was a martyr and the US, Belgium and Britain were evil. Such a bald dichotomy may have a lot of truth to it, but it would also simplify what truth is, which is often a manifold attempt at comprehending a given situation. One comes away from Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, unequivocal and ambivalent simultaneously. We may unequivocally believe that Lumumba was taken out as a political interference, yet also understand that the power and force required to extract resources from nations that had made their own countries rich on the basis of them was going to be much greater than simply the presence of a liberated people.
Nevertheless, any ambivalence one feels is quite distinct from irony, if both ambiguity and irony share a dichotomous dimension. After all, ambiguity indicates more than one response, just as irony proposes more than one meaning. But the risk with irony is that it leaves one aloof, and few watching the marvellous Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y will likely be moved by the conclusion. It ironically explores a moment when terrorism and media were symbiotically relying on each other for sensationalism. The terror organisations needed the publicity; the media needed the ratings. In the new film, this is not so. Instead of complicity, the film shows duplicity, with many blacks the victims of the immediate impact of post-colonial meddling. ‘‘That moment in time is actually the ground zero of the West for the neocolonial grab of the resources in the African continent,’’ Grimonprez says. ‘’It is a ‘scramble for Africa’ again, because of its resources.’’ (Brussels Times) While Lumumba lost his life, a number of black American musicians lost whatever faith they had in American goodwill and fairness as they were used by the CIA. Some were more cognizant of it than others, but many were aware enough of the manipulations to feel disgusted by the country. Simone nicknamed it The ‘United Snakes of America’ (The Nation) and, though Maithe Chini reckons the film possesses a ‘’heavy dose of irony’’ (Brussels Times), that surely describes some of Grimonprez’s earlier work more readily than it does Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. It is as if the soundtrack to the film is a hymn to possibilities that were so incipiently in the music, and so completely absent from the politics. It creates a wonderfully disjunctive sadness that to define it as ironic would undermine the affect Grimonprez surely seeks. It looks back on an era that was full of hope and leaps forward to register the depth of the subsequent hopelessness, all the while using the music of Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbie Lincoln, Louis Armstrong, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and others to propose that while it might be very hard to remain optimistic in the face of such mendacity and manipulation down the years, the music nevertheless contains the promise of the possible, the love rather than the power Hardt discusses, and that Grimonprez surely believes in.

© Tony McKibbin