“Africa is shaped like a gun, and the Congo is its trigger.” 

— Frantz Fanon

Over the year, I saw Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État a few times. It is not an easy film to watch, and it always demands another viewing. Watching archival footage of Patrice Lumumba in the 150-minute long Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is like glimpsing a bold future stolen before it could take root—a vision crushed under the weight of colonial greed and Cold War politics. The documentary’s backbone is this raw historical footage, anchoring its fierce narrative with Lumumba’s electrifying presence and unrealized dreams.

The Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a haunting, archivally immersive documentary that revisits the history of Cold War-era coups, focusing on the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo. Through a combination of archival footage, jazz music, and historical texts, the documentary reinterprets a politically charged event and challenges viewers to reconsider the broader implications of global power dynamics.  The film’s aesthetic, which is simultaneously film, art, documentary, and a memory theatre, engages the audience in a powerful and evocative historical inquiry. Jazz serves as a cultural and political counterpoint, confronting the audience with the cyclical nature of interventionist violence and the urgency of bearing witness. 

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État emerges as a vital lens to examine the troubling dynamics of global power, manipulation, and the moral failures of international institutions. In the shadow of the Gaza genocide, where Western nations have repeatedly vetoed ceasefires, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued selective arrest warrants, Grimonprez’s film resonates as a chilling reflection of systemic duplicity. By dissecting the media’s complicity and the West’s cynical manoeuvring within institutions ostensibly designed for justice, the film speaks to the continuity of such machinations from the post-war era to the present.

Grimonprez’s work, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, is not a conventional documentary. It situates itself in a historical lineage of geopolitical betrayal, echoing the blatant manipulations seen during the Congo Crisis of the 1960s. Then, as now, Western powers wielded international organizations as tools for preserving their interests, often at the cost of human lives and sovereignty in the Global South. In Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, Grimonprez juxtaposes archival footage, media broadcasts, and dissonant soundscapes in a unique, fragmented, associative structure that mirrors the fractured realities of political crises. This structure urges viewers to interrogate how narratives of intervention and justice are constructed—and for whose benefit.

The scene of Lumumba’s electrifying speech on June 30, 1960, during Congo’s Independence Day celebrations, in a setting dominated by Belgian dignitaries, Lumumba directly challenges colonial exploitation, speaking to both the Congolese people and the colonial power. This moment is pivotal in setting the film’s tone and as a symbolic declaration of Lumumba’s defiance against the Western powers. The tension between Lumumba’s words and the uncomfortable expressions of the Belgian officials captures the ideological divide between Congo’s aspirations for self-determination and the lingering grip of colonialism. This sequence is reinforced by Grimonprez’s choice to intersperse it with archival footage of colonial brutality, drawing a visceral connection between Lumumba’s defiance and the history of oppression he seeks to dismantle. The scene’s intensity is amplified by jazz undertones that convey the audacity and danger of Lumumba’s stance, setting up his eventual downfall as inevitable yet tragically unjust.

Today, as Gaza’s devastation unfolds amidst Western-backed impunity, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État offers a critical perspective on the perpetuation of this moral bankruptcy. It confronts audiences with the uncomfortable truths behind the West’s self-proclaimed role as arbiter of democracy and human rights, exposing the hypocrisy embedded in its actions. By reflecting on the media’s role in shaping public perceptions and the instrumentalization of international law, the film invites viewers to recognize these patterns not as aberrations, but as deliberate continuities of a deeply entrenched system.

In the context of today’s world, grappling with the consequences of power unchecked by accountability, Grimonprez’s film, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, is not merely a historical document. It is a call to examine the present critically. As the world continues to witness the devastating consequences of Western-backed impunity, the film underscores the urgency of challenging these narratives and advocating for genuine justice in an era of moral and institutional crisis.

All that Jazz

In Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, jazz is not just a musical backdrop. It pulses as witness and accomplice, threading through the era’s revolutionary fervour and imperial manipulations. Piercing through the weight of newsreels, political speeches, and biographical accounts is the electrifying pulse of jazz. This dynamic current drives the film forward, infusing it with momentum and intensity. The film casts its gaze on the jazz icons entangled in these dynamics—some by choice, others by circumstance. Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, with their liberationist anthems and unwavering defiance, are at the heart of this story. Their activism transcended performance, manifesting in moments like their dramatic disruption of a 1961 United Nations meeting, a bold gesture that fused art with direct political intervention. 

The notion of rhythm in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État operates on multiple levels, shaping the film’s musical atmosphere and cinematic structure. With its historical roots in African-American resistance and expression, jazz functions as more than a Soundtrack in the film; it provides a structural model. Jazz’s improvisational nature mirrors the unpredictable path of Lumumba’s life, political vision, and eventual assassination. The rhythm of jazz, full of syncopations, sudden breaks, and unexpected flows, embodies the film’s approach to depicting history not as a fixed narrative but as an ongoing dialogue marked by resistance, struggle, and adaptation.

But jazz’s role is not confined to resistance. The film scrutinizes its co-optation by Cold War politics, with figures like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan dispatched abroad as “cultural ambassadors.” Sent by the U.S. Department of Information to showcase the virtues of democracy, these artists embodied a carefully curated narrative of freedom that masked the country’s contradictions. Grimonprez sharpens his focus on Armstrong and Gillespie, exploring the dualities of their roles as symbols of liberation and propaganda tools. The film’s title signals a centrality of music, but Grimonprez uses jazz less as an emotional cue and more as a dialectical force. At times, this approach feels provocative to the point of discomfort, as when John Coltrane’s mute and isolated image is deployed during a sequence about the Congo’s turmoil. The sound is muted, leaving only the intensity of his face—a haunting, perhaps exploitative gesture that turns Coltrane’s silence into a rhetorical device. His concentrated expression becomes a silent metaphor, a choice that courts controversy by silencing his music to amplify the film’s point.

Amid these tensions, Grimonprez finds striking intersections where jazz becomes a direct interlocutor with history. Thelonius Monk’s restless piano echoes the impassioned demands of Congolese representatives in Brussels. Nina Simone’s lament, “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” accompanies revelations of her entanglement with a CIA-backed cultural initiative. Dizzy Gillespie’s joyous rhythm synchronizes with Khrushchev’s infamous shoe-thumping at the United Nations, a surreal duet of Cold War theatre. Armstrong’s tender “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” underscores Eisenhower hosting Khrushchev at Camp David; the intimacy of the song refracted through layers of diplomatic artifice.

Ultimately, the film presents jazz as a metaphor for freedom and a mirror of its truncation. Its improvisations—boundless, chaotic, defiantly independent—clash against the rigid structures of the empire. In juxtaposing the music’s soaring aspirations with the bloodshed in the Congo and the repression within the United States, Grimonprez crafts a narrative of tension and fracture. From Art Blakey’s “Freedom Rider” to the complexities of Max Roach’s notion of “four-way independence,” jazz becomes a contested space, its rhythms caught between emancipation and exploitation, a soundtrack to liberation and its betrayal.

Assemblage of mediated images

Grimonprez’s films blur the boundary between political discourse and aesthetic exploration, embodying a vision where the act of editing itself becomes a site of ideological resistance. By dismantling the conventions of classical cinematic language and reimagining the relationship between the filmmaker, the subject, and the constructed gaze of the image, his oeuvre transforms into a profound political gesture. His work interrogates the lineage of film history and mediated image-making as he excavates archival images—seeking past images’ archives, revealing their capacity to unearth the fault lines of historical contradiction.

Through his relentless experimentation with the documentary form and subject, Grimonprez transcends its traditional confines, emerging as a virtuoso of the film essay—a medium where memory, critique, and artistry converge in a luminous synthesis. Thus, with an intricate filmic essay, Grimonprez not only reshapes our understanding of the past but also redefines the contours of cinema itself.

Grimonprez’s cinematic technique is marked by a richly textured assemblage of archival footage, photographs, audio clips, and film excerpts. Rather than relying on a linear narrative or a traditional voiceover, he creates a mosaic of historical fragments, which he artfully arranges to allow audiences to reconstruct the events surrounding Lumumba’s assassination. By layering these disparate media, Grimonprez invites viewers into an active process of meaning-making, challenging them to draw connections between various aspects of the Cold War, colonialism, and resistance.

One of Grimonprez’s signature techniques is using seemingly unrelated images later revealed to be thematically connected, prompting viewers to look beyond surface appearances. For instance, a clip of a Western news anchor reporting on Congo’s “instability” might be followed by footage of American civil rights protests. This juxtaposition suggests that the fight for justice and equality in Africa is part of a global narrative, particularly resonant within the African diaspora. Through these layered visuals, Grimonprez dismantles the illusion of objective history, presenting history as a series of ideological interpretations that must be questioned.

Grimonprez’s technique also incorporates an “audio collage” approach, where voiceovers, music, and diegetic sounds intersect to create complex emotional and ideological undertones. This method of using overlapping sounds and music further immerses the viewer in the historical moment and in the emotional resonance of each sequence. Including interviews, speeches, and fragments of songs breaks up the expected flow, lending a sense of unpredictability and heightening the documentary’s impact. Grimonprez’s editing style is integral to the film’s rhythm, both in its sonic sense and narrative. The cuts are often abrupt and disorienting, but they serve a purpose: each scene transition is like a jazz improvisation, a total of sudden changes and unexpected shifts. This editing style reinforces the chaotic and turbulent atmosphere surrounding Lumumba’s rise and fall while encouraging viewers to experience the tension and instability of the period. Grimonprez’s editing reflects the instability of Congo during Lumumba’s leadership, where political decisions and foreign interests collided unpredictably, often with deadly results.

By creating a rhythm of quick cuts, pauses, and lingering scenes, Grimonprez mirrors jazz’s unpredictability. This is particularly noticeable in scenes where archival footage is rapidly interspersed with jazz compositions. For example, the editing might speed up during public unrest or political speeches, conveying urgency and conflict. In contrast, moments of sorrow—such as Lumumba’s capture or the aftermath of his assassination—are often depicted with slower, more meditative cuts, creating an almost reverent silence around these images.

Another distinctive editing choice is the film’s use of jump cuts and fades. Jump cuts disrupt continuity, reminding viewers that the documentary is an assemblage of fragments and interpretations rather than a seamless historical narrative. Meanwhile, fades create a temporal bridge, suggesting that the effects of Lumumba’s assassination continue to resonate in Congo’s present. These techniques contribute to an immersive experience where time feels fluid, reinforcing the notion that historical trauma persists, refusing to be confined to the past. 

The film vibrates with a haunting interplay of voices and rhythms, piecing together the shards of a history shaped by violence, betrayal, and imperial ambition. At its core lies a collection of texts, each illuminating a facet of the Congo’s tragic entanglement with Cold War geopolitics. My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin, brought to life through the stirring narration of Marie Daulne (Zap Mama), exudes both defiance and despair, its reflections on colonial subjugation and personal sacrifice deeply resonant. Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. offers a bitterly sardonic lens on the failures of postcolonial governance, its sharp prose a damning critique of neocolonial continuity. Patrick Cruise O’Brien’s reading of his father Conor Cruise O’Brien’s To Katanga and Back underscores the hypocrisy of international diplomacy. At the same time, Nikita Khrushchev’s audio memoirs expose the machinations of power, a chilling reminder of how the Congo was carved into a pawn on the global chessboard.

Yet the film’s narrative ambitions are illuminated and complicated by its soundscape. Jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Nina Simone intertwine with African luminaries such as Miriam Makeba and Le Grand Kallé, creating a dissonant harmony that mirrors the chaos of the events it depicts. John Coltrane’s urgent saxophone and Charles Mingus’s volatile bass lines evoke the fractured hopes of a nation fighting for its soul. Meanwhile, Congolese artists like Dr Nico and Rock-a-Mambo echo with bittersweet nostalgia, their vibrant melodies juxtaposed against the backdrop of a country systematically stripped of its sovereignty.

Jazz is a central motif in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, functioning as a form of resistance that underscores the documentary’s anti-imperialist message. The choice of jazz, with its deep roots in African-American culture and its historical association with social and political resistance, aligns with Lumumba’s struggle against colonial rule. The music becomes a political language, symbolizing the global dimensions of racial oppression and solidarity. In this way, jazz provides an auditory counter-narrative to the political violence depicted on screen, as the musicians’ improvisations mirror Lumumba’s struggle to navigate the political machinations of the Cold War. This use of jazz as a form of political speech underscores Grimonprez’s awareness of the power of sound in shaping historical memory, elevating the documentary from a visual experience to a multisensory engagement with history.

Mediated Image as a Form

Johan Grimonprez, born into the age of television, has built a career dissecting the seductive power and corrosive effects of mediated images. Grimonprez’s visual essays move seamlessly between critique and poetry, exposing how media transforms how we see the world and how we dream within it. His works starkly contrast cinema and television, reflecting their evolution. As Vrääth Öhner observes, cinema is akin to flight—a dreamlike escape. Television trades dreams for nightmares, becoming a machine that mass-produces images of fear and chaos. Grimonprez uses this shift as a foundation to interrogate the contemporary “info-dystopia,” where reality is mediated through prepackaged images that distort and distract. From Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y to Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, he examines history’s wreckage, blending archival footage, narrative fragments, and critical theory to expose how fiction often anticipates, and even shapes, reality.

In his breakthrough work, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Grimonprez crafts a fragmented history of aeroplane hijackings that transcends its premise to explore how terrorism and mass media feed into one another. The film’s prophetic resonance with 9/11 is less its focus than the more profound critique it offers: in a world saturated by screens, extreme violence becomes a grim spectacle that restores urgency to an otherwise numbed reality. The Soundtrack to a Coup d’État bears the marks of hyperlinking and nonlinear editing, sculpting a kaleidoscopic narrative of decolonization, self-determination, and the betrayal of those ideals. Whether addressing the global arms trade inShadow World (2016) or the commodification of fear in Double Take (2009), Grimonprez’s work critiques the machinery of media manipulation while drawing viewers into its tangled web. Where the stories we tell ourselves shape our fragile worldview, Grimonprez’s films demand that we see history not just as an observer but as a participant ensnared in its ever-unfolding spectacle. 

Rick Chaubet, the young editor behind Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, represents a generational shift in filmmaking—a storyteller shaped by the interconnected and nonlinear logic of the Internet age. Where traditional editing often follows a linear narrative path, Chaubet’s approach embraces the rhizomatic, a structure inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, where connections proliferate unpredictably, creating a web of meaning rather than a single thread. This method lends Grimonprez’s film its unique, multilayered quality, where history, culture, and media are interwoven into a kaleidoscopic whole. Chaubet’s digital sensibility manifests in the film’s hyperlink-like structure, where ideas and events leap across time and space, creating unexpected juxtapositions that demand active engagement from the viewer. Chaubet constructs these intersections not as chaotic overlays but as deliberate collisions illuminating the recurring patterns of power and resistance. His editing style mimics the fragmented yet interconnected nature of the digital world, capturing the simultaneity of narratives that define contemporary media.

Chaubet amplifies Grimonprez’s critique of mediated reality by adopting this digital-era framework. The rhizomatic structure doesn’t just recount the story of decolonization and betrayal—it mirrors how history unfolds, not as a linear progression but as a tangle of influences, events, and narratives. Chaubet’s editing becomes an act of storytelling as a critique, reflecting the destabilizing force of modern media while creating a cinematic experience that resists passive consumption. Through this approach, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État becomes more than a historical essay—it becomes a living, breathing artefact of our interconnected, image-saturated age.

The Essay Film

Nora M. Alter posits that the essay film is a fluid, hybrid form that defies traditional cinematic categories like documentary and fiction. In The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction, she traces the genre’s evolution from the early 20th century, which emerged from overlapping filmmaking traditions to its recognition as a distinct form in the 21st century. Long grouped with documentaries or occasionally art films, the essay film’s defining characteristics—indeterminacy, hybridity, and openness—have gained contemporary relevance, prompting its identification as a genre in its own right. Alter argues that this metamorphic quality, both in origin and ongoing evolution, embodies the genre’s unique resonance and adaptability.

Unlike documentaries, which often strive for clarity and definitive arguments, essay films embrace ambiguity. They prioritize exploration over resolution, encouraging viewers to navigate shifting perspectives and layered interpretations. Through this process, audiences are estranged from conventional viewing habits and drawn into critical reflection. Nora Alter illustrates this with the metaphor of anamorphosis—a distorted projection that requires the viewer to adjust their perspective to discern its meaning. Essay films similarly disrupt familiar frames of reference, challenging spectators to question their assumptions and adopt new vantage points. 

Tracing the long history and various transmutations of the essay film and addressing its present-day ramifications, Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan argue that essay films occupy a unique and hybrid space in cinema, challenging traditional boundaries between documentary, fiction, and experimental forms. Unlike documentaries, which often present clear arguments or factual narratives, essay films embrace openness and ambiguity, prioritizing exploration over resolution. This form engages the audience in a dynamic meaning-making process as viewers navigate multiple perspectives and interpretive possibilities rather than following a singular narrative logic. Through this estrangement, essay films encourage critical reflection, requiring the audience to actively participate in the construction of significance.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État exemplifies the essay film’s unique power to engage with complexity by juxtaposing archival footage, media broadcasts, and scenes of political upheaval against an evocative soundtrack; the film resists the linear logic of traditional documentaries. Instead, it employs a fragmented, associative structure that positions the spectator as an active participant in constructing meaning.

Estrangement is crucial to the film’s impact. Rapid editing, dissonant soundscapes, and shifting perspectives disorient the viewer, mirroring the fractured realities of political power and media manipulation. By refusing to offer a singular narrative, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État illuminates the constructedness of political narratives and invites audiences to interrogate the interplay between events and their representation.

Grimonprez’s work defies neat categorization, sitting at the intersection of documentary, art film, and historical critique. Yet, like many essay films, it retains a reflexive quality that compels viewers to question not only the content but the mechanisms of its depiction. This hybrid approach underscores the essay film’s potential to transcend genre, offering a platform for critical engagement that is as much about the process of representation as the subject itself.

This reflexivity is central to the essay film’s ethos. By interrogating its methods alongside its subject matter, the form achieves a layered complexity that resonates deeply in an era of contested truths and mediated realities. Essay films wield their hybridity as both an aesthetic and political instrument, addressing issues too intricate for traditional genres to encompass. 

Alter’s exploration of the essay film highlights its unique role in redefining cinema’s relationship with truth, representation, and inquiry. Films like Grimonprez demonstrate how the form challenges audiences to rethink not only what they see but also how they see it. By embracing ambiguity and hybridity, the essay film becomes more than a genre—it is a dynamic space for intellectual and aesthetic engagement, a cinematic dialogue that continually reshapes itself in response to the complexities of the world it seeks to understand.

The Old Conceits

The connection between The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte, White Malice by Susan Williams, and the Soundtrack to a Coup d’État lies in their shared excavation of the mechanisms of imperial domination and the cultural undercurrents that sustain them. While De Witte and Williams focus on the overt and covert machinations of Western powers to suppress African sovereignty, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État highlights the cultural and ideological dimensions of these interventions, particularly the role of media, propaganda, and performance in legitimizing neocolonial violence. Together, these works reveal that the violence of imperialism operates on multiple registers: physical, political, and cultural. De Witte and Williams expose the physical and political acts of subjugation. At the same time, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État reminds us of the symbolic and sensory dimensions, showing how power is not only seized but also sonically and visually performed. The enduring resonance of these narratives in contemporary geopolitics reveals the need to interrogate what is done and how it is framed, heard, and remembered.

The omission of Congo’s uranium and its critical role in the Manhattan Project in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—a film that seeks to dramatize the moral and scientific dilemmas of the atomic bomb—reveals a significant blind spot in the narrative of nuclear history. By focusing almost exclusively on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s internal struggles and the scientific race to build the bomb, the film effectively abstracts the Manhattan Project from its colonial and geopolitical underpinnings. By contrast, Susan Williams’ White Malice underscores how the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga, Congo, and its exploitation are indispensable to understanding the atomic age.

The Shinkolobwe mine supplied the uranium that powered the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This material, extracted under Belgian colonial rule, was not merely a logistical detail but a manifestation of how imperial extraction systems underpinned Western powers’ nuclear ambitions. The mine’s workers, subjected to inhumane conditions and environmental degradation, laboured to fuel a project that would reshape global power dynamics without any acknowledgement of their contributions—or suffering.

By excluding this crucial element, Oppenheimer unintentionally perpetuates a narrative that frames the atomic bomb as the product of isolated genius and moral quandary in the U.S., divorced from the violent realities of resource extraction and colonial exploitation. This telling omission reflects the larger Western tendency to erase or marginalize the contributions and sacrifices of the Global South in monumental historical achievements.

Williams’ work makes it clear that the story of the atomic bomb is incomplete without recognizing how the Congo’s uranium was a decisive factor in its development. The Cold War competition that shaped the Manhattan Project was mirrored in the post-war struggles for Congo’s independence, where the West’s covert actions, including the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, ensured continued access to the region’s strategic resources. By leaving out this history, Nolan’s film not only simplifies the Manhattan Project but also silences the voices of those whose labour and land were instrumental in the dawn of the nuclear age. The omission is not merely an artistic choice but a political one.

Footage of Teslas and iPhones serves as a potent reminder that the scramble for Africa (and its mineral wealth) and the struggle for global natural resources in the Third World continues.

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.