Rather than proving secondary to this picture, the soundtrack serves as an organising principle. Grimonprez reframes history itself as jazz: sometimes harmonious, often improvised and bordering on unfathomable, occasionally murderously dissonant. But he also gives us film as jazz, too. If the thinking is broadly anti-colonial, so too the montage recognises no borders: this kind of archive footage rubs up against that kind of archive footage, sometimes to underline a point, sometimes to counterpoint, sometimes just to be mischievous. (Witness Eisenhower meeting Kruschchev while Louie sings "I'm confessing that I love you".) Elsewhere, macro and micro mesh. History carries us from the UN in New York to the households of Brazzaville, allowing Grimonprez and editor Rik Chaubet to stitch together a link between pipe-smoking CIA chief Allen Dulles, René Magritte and Colonel Mobutu, head of the armed forces massing against Lumumba. Elsewhere, they create odd little echoes and funny ripples within this history: Khrushchev's tendency to thump tables with his fists in moments of high drama comes to rhyme with Art Blakey's drumming. What becomes impressive is Grimonprez's own command of tempo: whenever the political toing-and-froing is getting too baroque or intense, he can cut away to a marvellous Duke Ellington or Miriam Makeba clip, allowing us to catch our collective breath.
That back-and-forth movement brings us closer to the shifting allegiances - and mounting turbulence - of this historical moment, when Africa and Asia stood up on the floor of the UN in a push for a more powerful voting bloc. Lumumba and his right-hand woman/comrade-in-arms, the remarkable Andrée Blouin, were unifiers: at the UN, they became a cause others could rally around, while at home, they sought to centralise and consolidate Black power while repelling those liplickers lining up to exploit their homeland. Yet they would be undermined, both from within and without, by those who were prepared to permit Congolese independence - but only so much independence. Events get ugly in the closing stretch, as the historical record insists they must, but it's the most complete account of this crisis I've yet encountered, meticulous in its onscreen sourcing, and lent a further dimension by the material Grimonprez works in: fleeting cameos from Robin Day, Eva Gabor, Fidel Castro and sometime Eurotrash fave Eddy Wally as the singing face of colonial distraction; an ominous drumfill here, a honking, siren-like sax solo there, the wails of a blues singer lamenting yet another historical wrong. Some achievement, all told: you can't fail to come away better informed, but you also emerge wildly stirred and stimulated.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'État is available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player, and on Blu-ray via Modern Films.
