Lumumba Lives! Alongside Max, Abbey, Dizzy and Duke in ‘Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat’

In the hands of Johan Grimonprez, archival footage carries a 200-volt charge. That dusty patina and musty aroma that envelops most period documentaries? Not a whiff in Grimonprez’s work, which crackles, buzzes and stings like a live wire hitched to the pulse of history.

The Belgian filmmaker and visual essayist’s bracing, relentless Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat, which premiered at Sundance and screens Thursday, April 25 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival (April 24–28), takes us back to the mid-1950s through mid-1960s when Africa’s continent-wide movement for independence and solidarity coincided with the Cold War between jousting superpowers as well as the emerging Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

The film’s through line is Patrice Lumumba, a beer salesman in the Belgian colony of the Congo and skilled public speaker who emerged to lead the successful campaign for independence. In June 1960 he was elected the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo; seven months later, following a U.S. and Belgium-backed coup by Col. Joseph Mobutu, Lumumba was murdered with two political allies. He was 35.

Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) made an essential but hard-to-find documentary, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1991), as well as the 2000 biopic Lumumba (streaming for free on Kanopy). Grimonprez doesn’t retrace Peck’s steps (let alone revisit 19th-century Belgian atrocities) so much as re-cast Lumumba’s visionary pan-Africanism — portrayed by the international media of the time as radical, primitive, violent and Communist-leaning — as reasonable Black expression.

To put it another way, the filmmaker is less concerned with the injustice and tragedy of Lumumba’s death than how the white power structure (President Dwight Eisenhower, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, Belgian and U.S. business interests and European mercenaries) exerted its will, protected its mineral and commercial holdings and changed the path of African history. (I shouldn’t limit myself to the past tense, as Grimonprez’s inclusion of color Tesla and Apple iPhone ads in the black-and-white flow reminds us.)

I apologize for withholding until now the “soundtrack” that Grimonprez deploys as poignant, pleasurable counterpoint to the shadowy narrative of devious ambassadors and smug spooks, and cowed United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. It is vintage, wall-to-wall jazz, beginning with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, who will reappear at a climactic UN Security Council meeting in the wake of Lumumba’s murder.

The precise starting point, though, is Louis Armstrong, who toured the world as a goodwill ambassador in the decades after World War II. In fact, the State Department sponsored his trips to Africa in the 1950s. Even without seeing Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat, you can imagine Satchmo’s pleasure at his reception in pre-independence Ghana, his fury at the racism and violence that Black Americans experienced at the same time, and his distaste for being used by his government to “Blackwash” its domestic policies abroad.

Grimonprez, who is receiving SFFILM’s annual Persistence of Vision Award presented to a non-narrative filmmaker (previous winners include Trinh T. Minh-ha, Kenneth Anger and Heddy Honigmann), has a rare, ephemeral talent with news footage and vintage interviews that allows us to experience — while the story is moving forward, albeit with digressions — how broadcasters and cameramen framed their subjects at the time. The condescension and racism are palpable.

In the event you can’t catch Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat at the festival, and even if you can, Kanopy has an earlier, even more visceral Grimonprez foray into moving-image archives. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) is an often-shocking compilation from the ’70s heyday of commercial airline hijackings by terrorists of various stripes that finds the horror in the banality of distanced, objective news footage.

One of the pleasures of the new film is the way in which time, context and a skillful editor shift our perspectives of historical figures. Long before Benetton, Nikita Khrushchev (First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers) and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro are aware of the performative and symbolic value of their public appearances.

Every appearance and word in this film by Malcolm X, meanwhile, sparkles with wisdom, insight and courage. He is beyond direct; he’s a genuine prophet. Yet in his lifetime, the media portrayed him as a dangerous fringe figure. How might the world look today if Lumumba and Malcolm had lived longer? Would the promise of African self-rule have come to fruition? Would Johan Grimonprez be in the Bay Area this week with a film called Soundtrack for a Revolution?

Grimonprez doesn’t pose those questions, at least not directly. But they are woven into the film, in the soulful notes of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Art Blakey and Ornette Coleman.

The presentation of SFFILM’s Persistence of Vision Award begins at 6:30 p.m. on April 25 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive with director Johan Grimonprez and presenter Fumi Okiji expected to attend. ‘Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat’ plays at 7 p.m. Find tickets and more information here.