On demand: "Soundtrack to a Coup d'État"

The film essayist Johan Grimonprez last broached British cinemas all the way back in 2010 with Double Take, where the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the events of the Cold War criss-crossed in supremely entertaining and illuminating fashion. With Soundtrack to a Coup d'État, Grimonprez offers two histories for the price of one, on subjects which once more intertwine. The first is a history of what Billy Joel in "We Didn't Start The Fire" summarised as "Belgians in the Congo", that mid-20th century colonial misadventure that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba by forces keeping a beady eye on the country's vast rubber, copper and uranium deposits. The second film - lest the first appear a touch dry - concerns American jazz at the turn of the 1960s: Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone et al. The connection between the two - and it's not such an arbitrary one - is that, in the very same moment, jazz had begun to be weaponised by the powers-that-be in a bid to baffle and outwit Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev (who wasn't a fan); key performers such as Armstrong were sent around the globe, missionary-like, so as to persuade other nations that Eisenhower's America had its house in order. (Even if its ongoing problems with race positioned the majority of its Black population as akin to house slaves.) As you'd maybe expect from an Oscar-nominated doc, Soundtrack proves clear-eyed and serious in its editorial line, yet Grimonprez folds in all that jazz to produce something more cinematic besides: it's Cold War: The Musical! With footnotes! Only the Congolese climate prevents me from adding: On ice!

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.