Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat which covers the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. Emerging themes include secret plots, obfuscation, Jazz as a visual structure, and film as a PhD thesis. Astrologically these themes relate to the 12th house, Saturn in its joy in the 12th, Venus, the air element, and Mercury.
Distribution: Currently on Theatrical Run, more info
Director: Johan Grimonprez
Run Time: 150 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.496] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All The Way Down podcast, where we break down the archetypal dynamics of stories. And we've been focusing on the 2024 edition of Sundance, specifically looking at 36 different documentaries. And today we're on the fourth out of five of a section that we're calling Deconstructing Dominant Power Structures. Today's episode is about a piece called Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, which is within the World Cinema Documentary Competition, and it actually won a special jury award for cinematic innovation. So this is by Johan Grimonprez. So Wonder, maybe you could read through the synopsis that was provided for this film.
[00:00:54.053] Wonder Bright: Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat. In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake. Musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council. Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America's color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup. Director Johan Grimonprez, who directed Double Take in 2009, returns to Sundance with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving “algorithm of Congo Inc”. In addition to Bofane's observations, Grimonprez invokes a veritable canon of African-American jazz music to animate a rich fabric of griot texts, eyewitness accounts, official government memos, and testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives to shine light on one of the most insidious political machinations of the 20th century: how the Belgian monarchy, the United States government, and multinational corporations colluded to weaponize art institutions and legendary jazz musicians as cover for covert operations to assassinate Congo's premier prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is a timely story of precedent that speaks to today's geopolitical terrain in the Democratic Republic of Congo and around the world. And that synopsis was brought to us by Sundance programmer, Shari Frilot.
[00:02:36.745] Kent Bye: Yeah. One of the key phrases of that synopsis that jumps out to me was essay film. And I would take it one step further. I would say this is more of like watching a PhD dissertation in the film format.
[00:02:50.094] Wonder Bright: Oh my gosh, that is such a good analogy.
[00:02:53.996] Kent Bye: Just because they have so much information, it’s, like, you're really overwhelmed with reading a lot of stuff. And I think the narrative structure was presenting all of this data and information, but also always citing their sources. I think it's the first film I've ever saw that actually had proper footnotes throughout the entirety of the whole film. It’s, like, here's who was interviewed. Here's where the source is. I felt like I needed like a bibliography after this film.
[00:03:19.554] Wonder Bright: I felt like I needed a Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat for dummies. That's what I really was hoping for. I was so excited to watch this. And I felt like I was trying to understand an academic treatise. It was basically impenetrable to me because I just don't have enough knowledge of the time to follow the leaps that they were making. In the same way that a film that we spoke about earlier in this series, As We Speak, deconstructs the subject matter they're looking at through this virtuoso experience of hip hop music, like, the aesthetic and the structure is like a hip hop music video. This film feels like a jazz song, which sort of by nature is really inventive, collaborative, loose, improvisational, and brings in many different things, like, pulls together all sorts of different threads at different moments. And to the untrained ear, to jazz, it can actually sometimes sound a bit atonal. So this is going to sound counterintuitive to what I'm saying. Like, I had a hard time finding myself in it, and I found it off-putting. I wanted to understand, and yet I kept being thwarted from it. And the thing that will sound counterintuitive is that I think that's actually the strength of the film. Like, I think that's actually the point. So I didn't get it, but I get that I didn't get it, if you see what I'm saying.
[00:04:50.733] Kent Bye: Well, this won an award for cinematic innovation. I feel like this could have very well been in the next section that is pushing the bounds of how stories are being told because there are a lot of ways that it's being innovative. And because it's being innovative and pushing up against the edges of what we've seen before, in terms of a new genre, we don't have a lot of references to know what to expect. So we kind of walk into this not knowing what to expect. This is the first film that we watched on a journey of 56 hours worth of watching documentaries over seven days. And it was a little bit of a - Wonder Bright: I was like, oh no, is it all going to be like this? Kent Bye: And I say that just because I usually take some rough notes and I found myself taking a lot of notes just to even parse and track what was happening. Wonder Bright: It was a secondary soundtrack to the film. Kent typing away next to me. Kent Bye: So I was, like you said, it's like this jazz improv where there's no diegetic narration to set the broader context. It's basically, like, these clips and these associative links that you have to draw the connection and a conclusion from. And we're talking about in the section of deconstructing dominant power structures. And so even though the Congo is going through this moment of liberation, you have this half liberation or half decolonization where you break off a section of the country. There was this mining company that then gets broken off, still having this colonial impulse into extracting all these minerals that are being used and say, batteries, or uranium, nuclear weapons. And so they have this juxtaposition where they're just like, do a jump cut to a Tesla car, or a jump cut to technology, or a jump cut to a nuclear weapon. But it’s, like, this cinematic language of trying to draw these associative links, like, hey, even though they're trying to maintain their independence, the powers that be are trying to maintain ownership or control over this area, because they still need these precious metals to be able to extract their natural resources and deprive them of their own wealth from that country. And to have all these backdoor secret shenanigans that are maintaining that power, but also this pernicious PR front of using these jazz musicians to be the front, and have these ambassadors and diplomatic journeys into these different countries. And they have Khrushchev from Russia who ends up being this voice of decolonization. He's from Russia, who within itself is not always necessarily the best actor, but in this context of this film is really speaking on behalf of the workers and this impulse to get rid of the colonial impulse of these countries from going in and stealing all these resources. Not that Russia from either at that time or afterwards have also been completely innocent of all these different impulses, but at least from that voice, there is somebody with Khrushchev who is trying to speak to this broader context.
[00:07:46.465] Wonder Bright: He's just more in touch with Russia's Marxist roots, presumably. It's ironic given where we're at now with Russia, but it... Yeah, it was, it was - that was some of my favorite things in the film was just the incredible archival footage from the 60s and this time and this place where we got to experience thinkers and politicians and artists and people from the time that this film is drawing from. Like Khrushchev is a name that I'm familiar with, but I don't think I've ever actually seen footage of him. So it was really wild watching him at the United Nations, which at that point can't be more than like 20 years old, I don't think, right?
[00:08:28.178] Kent Bye: Yes, after World War II.
[00:08:29.979] Wonder Bright: Yeah, so it's got this vibrancy from the time and you also have this sense of, you know, I mean, this is, like, James Baldwin era, right? So you have this sense of the reclamation of black Americans really beginning to reconnect and rigorously analyze what is happening to them in a way that is really compelling and powerful when we're watching the raw performances and speech from people. I was just missing a structure that I could, like, hang the stories from. The stories were all vibrant but I was having a hard time connecting them because they weren't making the connections for you. I'm so impressed at the way that you were to make sense of it as you were watching it. I just found myself overwhelmed by the amount of stories that were thrown at me and the ways in which it wasn't made easy to follow it.
[00:09:28.550] Kent Bye: Yeah, because they have other threads that are in there that we haven't even talked about, like Malcolm X and all the different stuff that he's talking about, like speaking on behalf of racial justice. And he was also very much tracking what was happening in Congo and the liberation that was happening. It was, like, this inspiring moment of decolonization. And what's that mean for, you know, what's happening here in the United States, though, we're presumably in support of that. But yet, Khrushchev was very quick to point out the hypocrisy of the United States of not having equal rights for black citizens in the United States. But yet here, they're on the surface supporting what's happening for this decolonization, liberation of Congo. But yet, at the same time, we hear from all these spies, you know, very much a 12th House manifestation of these secret machinations of the government that is still basically undermining what's happening in the Congo and ultimately assassinating the leader there. So you have this kind of buildup to the assassination centered around this date of like June 30th, 1960. And then throughout the course of the film, you have this narrative structure where it's like, okay, we're two weeks out from this liberation. Here we are a month out. Here's like three months and four months and five months and ends up being, I think around like seven months later is the assassination. But you're kind of building up to this culminating point where you're using these jazz musicians as a front to basically be these diplomats to try to have this battle against communism in all these different areas and to bring about aspects of African American culture, jazz music around the world, but yet at the same time being used as a distraction to have all these secret CIA operations in the background, and we get to hear directly from some of those CIA operatives who are involved in that. The reason why I'm describing this as a PhD dissertation is because there's a certain amount of rigor here. If you want to have a different narrative, well, you're going to have to go to other primary sources that are above and beyond some of the direct eyewitnesses that are saying this. Because they're saying this is what happened with certain amounts of documentation, or at least the scholars that are being cited in the context of the story. The people have written the books around these secret CIA ops that have been happening in the context of Africa, in the context of liberation. But you have this other story of what was happening with musicians that was almost like a background soundtrack. Like the whole film was from one song to the next, like a music video that you're watching. But at the same time, you have the deeper political story that's happening, that you're really getting multiple sides of what's being said and what's not being said. And then you have to look at what the actions are that are happening behind the scenes to know what the full motivation is. In other words, they say it's a liberation, but yet it's a soundtrack to a coup d'etat because you're using the musicians to basically undermine this liberation through both the private interests of the corporations, the sort of 2nd House capitalism aspects, but also this 10th House colonial impulse that's still there. The roots of that colonialism isn't able to be fully detached. So, in terms of deconstructing the power structures, this is a film that is one example of how that happened in the context of Congo's liberation and the assassination of Lumumba.
[00:12:41.992] Wonder Bright: I really love how you're pointing to, in the same way that an academic paper points the reader to original texts to understand why they're making the arguments, that this film points to original texts that will help you make sense of what they're talking about. Because in addition to how really impressed and intrigued I was by In Koli Jean Bofane, who we hear about in the synopsis, but who is interviewed and he reads from his writing in the film, it’s just something about his presence that is really, really intriguing. And he's like clearly got some real insight into the matter that is vital information for us to have. But there were also recurring themes where they kept quoting Maya Angelou to launch themselves into the description of a certain circumstance that would have happened in this time. And it wasn't super clear in the way that they were quoting her because I think they quoted her and then they would put a year date. But after we'd finished watching the film, I did go and look up Maya Angelou writing in those dates. And the thing that comes up is a book from her called The Heart of a Woman, which was published in 1961. And I think that's where most of those quotes were from. And also there's this fantastic footage they have of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, which they also use as a refrain throughout the film, where they refer again and again to Abbey Lincoln, this, like, close up on her face as she's singing with such pathos and heartbreak and you can see Max Roach on the keyboard behind her, like this collaboration between these two powerful artists and they're singing from this album that they put out called Freedom Suite, We Insist In it. And the film pointed me in the direction of questions that I didn't know that I had about this time and what was happening among Black artists and thinkers at that time in a way that, you know, like you think about like a really big Marvel film like Black Panther coming out now. And this film kind of points me to the origins of something like that and the origins of Afrofuturism, where the African diaspora is actually making these connections with the land of their ancestors that they were ripped from and no longer have those links to. And what does it look like to watch the United States continue to perpetuate the same kind of harms done in that continent now from the space of actually being American citizens themselves? So yeah, so this film stirred up a lot for me and it gave me a feeling of a time without really a sense that I could understand it very well. And yet at the same time, it pointed me in the direction of people and folk that could help me understand it better.
[00:15:40.935] Kent Bye: Yeah. You know, this was the very first film that we watched and we actually got a screener for this film, which meant that we watched it before the official time for when Sundance was happening because we only had five days to watch 56 hours worth of film. And then there was another eight hours of Q&A. So that would have been like 11 to 12 hours of watching for five days. And so we spread it out over seven days. But that meant that we couldn't watch the Q&A in the intro. So we missed the intro and the Q&A. And this would have been one that I think I would have loved to hear the Q&A that happened at Sundance.
[00:16:14.990] Wonder Bright: Oh, my God, that would have been so great. I'm very curious about the people that made this and how they would have talked about it. Yeah.
[00:16:20.054] Kent Bye: Because I feel like now that you've seen it and we've talked about it, if you were to watch it a second time, I would imagine you'd be able to pick up on more of it.
[00:16:27.340] Wonder Bright: I don't know. I, for me personally, just because of the way my brain works, you, you really love like being confused, but I have like a breakdown because of growing up with a learning disorder. I still have, by the way. So when I'm confronted with too much information and I can't make sense of it, I get really frustrated and actually quite angry. And then I sort of experience this, like, existential angst that makes it really hard for me to take anything in. For me, I would potentially be interested in watching this again, but I wouldn't want to do it until I had a better understanding of the time that they were talking about. Then I think I would be like, oh my gosh, oh, they brought this in, and they brought this in, and then this happened, and oh wow, now that makes so much more, Oh, wow, and then I could understand it from, like, a heart space. But my brain was so messed up trying to just comprehend it from an informational standpoint that I really had a hard time feeling what was happening
[00:17:29.204] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I totally get that. And as I think about this film, there are some significations that I would like to break down a little bit. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts too. But for me, there's a, there's a deeper Saturn Pluto complex that I think technically isn't happening in this chart until a little bit later. But I feel like even if it's not happening in a specific chart, Tarnas has these 15 degree orbs, which gives these three to four year periods for Saturn Pluto.
[00:17:57.043] Wonder Bright: We also don't need Saturn, Pluto to deconstruct power systems. Like we don't need astrology to do that. We can just do it because it needs to be done.
[00:18:05.125] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. I'm just sort of speaking to the archetypal astrology that Tarnas is doing because there is this other aspect, which is the Uranus, Pluto aspect that's happening from 1960 to 1972, which is where you see a lot of the liberation movements that are happening for racial rights and gay rights and women's rights, environmental justice. There's a whole huge chapter in Cosmic Psyche.
[00:18:26.269] Wonder Bright: This film feels way more Uranus-Pluto than Saturn-Pluto to me.
[00:18:29.950] Kent Bye: Yeah.
[00:18:30.410] Wonder Bright: And, you know, as you've just demonstrated, Uranus-Pluto is good for deconstructing systems of power too.
[00:18:35.912] Kent Bye: Yeah, but in the heart of that Uranus-Pluto complex was a Saturn-Pluto opposition that was happening. So in the middle of the 60s with the Vietnam War, you have this kind of liberation movement, but you also have that same time people getting drafted and going to the war, which is actually kind of feeding into this other complex of Uranus-Pluto. So there's a lot of liberation dynamics, but yet it's at the very beginning of that, 1960 to 1972. So this is the beginning of the 60s. So it's like one step forward towards liberation, but not quite ready for the full liberation because at the time of liberation, there was a Mars opposite Neptune. So there's a bit of a confusing disillusioned aspects of the Neptune with the Mars and the fighting and the war. But I feel like one of the biggest signatures of this film, aside from the 5th House aspect, I feel like the 5th House provides like the emotional soundtrack to the piece. But in terms of the narrative, the narrative is not really getting into much about anything about the art or the music, you know, other than that, that was happening and that they were being used as a part of the systems of power for this other means, where there was a lot of other hidden aspects that were happening, talking to these CIA operatives. So I'm just going to read this brief section from Demetria George's Astrology and Theory in Practice, Volume 2, where she says, 12th House enemies are not only demons and actual persons, but also other kinds of hidden matters that have the potential to cause disruption and harm, such as secrets, scandals, family skeletons, physical dysfunctions, clandestine and illegal activities, spies, traitors, and witchcraft”. So I feel like there's a lot of spycraft and a lot of hidden machinations of power that we're really getting a sense of in this film that's really deconstructing this, not only from the US government, but potentially also the ways that the United Nations itself could have been complicit in helping to facilitate this situation. So there's other dimensions of this new power structure of the United Nations and how is that being used to subvert this kind of liberation power and how are the existing power structures slowly taking over and influencing institutions such as the United Nations to also further this goal of colonialization and ultimately enriching not only the mining company and the private interests of that mining company, but the products of that mining company, which are these precious metals that are serving the broader context of capitalism, as well as the military motivations and impulses of countries like the United States.
[00:20:59.724] Wonder Bright: For some reason, I'm thinking about the Saturn in the 12th House passage that you read from Demetra's book right now, too, in the last episode we did in Daughters, that there's something about Saturn having its joy in the 12th where the hidden enemies can be the most powerful ones, and they're creating a hidden structure that actually architects your own demise. For me, the main theme that I was able to pick up on because I didn't need to think to do it was Venus because of the music in this film, and the barrage and intensity of the film footage that they showed, both archival and the newer interviews with In Koli Jean Bofane. And I think I'm especially left with Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach's performance of Freedom Suite. So Dizzy Gillespie is pressing his lips to the trumpet, but instead of hearing a trumpet, we're hearing something else. And I remember just feeling so arrested in that moment. I think it's a symptom of my own particular reaction to the film that I don't remember what was actually being said, but that probably underscores what I'm saying here, that for me, it was a Venusian experience. That was my way into the film was to just surrender to it when I could as a visual and audio artifact. And the way that the filmmaker and the editor were able to weave this dense text, a literal text, with a visual text was sort of extraordinary, that I could have an experience of it, even if it wasn't a comprehensive or comprehending experience of it. And I know that they chose the Freedom Suite with Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, that that was one of the through lines for the film. And in the end of the film, when we finally got to watch them finish a song, and the close up is on Abbey Lincoln's face as she's singing and it's just, there's this heartache, but this, this fight, and this passion, and this fire in that closing sequence that just arrested me. That's what had me look up what is this piece of music, because I want to hear this again. This isn't just a soundtrack to a coup d'etat in the past. This is a soundtrack to a coup d'etat. Freedom Suite. We Insist On It.
[00:23:46.676] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know that, you know, we've got the 12th House significations and Saturn that I was talking about, you're talking a little bit more of the Venusian dimensions that you're picking up. But if you were to prescribe this Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat to somebody, like, who would you prescribe it to?
[00:24:03.280] Wonder Bright: I don't think I'm qualified to prescribe this one to anyone, but I would be really curious to hear from other people how they would prescribe it and how they would interpret this as a remedial measure. In this moment, I'm thinking back to what I said at the end of Power in terms of what medicine I feel Yance Ford has for us, which really, like, taps you into that experience of fighting, you know, to keep that fire in your belly lit. And I'm thinking to Abbey Lincoln singing at the end and those final frames of the film that this is like the soundtrack for that. So perhaps fire. But I really am genuinely curious if anyone has any idea about like or if anyone has, if it was medicine for anyone else, would you tell me how you would quantify that? I really would love to know.
[00:25:04.087] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I guess in part response to that, but also in this spirit of bearing witness to these films, I feel like this is a very experiential film in a way that it's the quality of presence of the air element and a lot of reading and interpretation. So there's a mercurial element of almost like trying to piece together the puzzle pieces, There's Timothy Morton who has this philosophy of hyper-objects, and the idea of a hyper-object is that it's such a complicated topic to break down colonialism, capitalism, racism. All these things are big, multifaceted, complex entities. And it's in the spirit of that complexity that this feels like a film for people that want a challenge in terms of pushing the edge of the cinematic storytelling language and how to really dive deep into this mercurial experience and this air element of really having to puzzle together with all these associative links. I wanted to just call out a couple other films that I feel like fit into this experiential mode of storytelling that are maybe different elements, like Realm of Satan, which we've talked about, which is much more of an earth element of really sitting with these embodied experiences and these environmental contexts to piece together a story. We have Skywalker's A Love Story, which we'll dive into, which I think is very much a fire element of like, It's really like an action type of experience that puts you on the edge of your seat as you're experiencing. It gives you this real visual experience. And then there was Nocturnes, which is much more of a water element, like the slow experience of time, a different quality of time as you're watching it, that we'll dive into the narrative structure of that. But this feels like the air element of a film that I really want to just reflect upon this quality of presence of air that is in the experiential part, but also it has the water element, which is also the music that's happening there. I feel like when I think about the quadrivium, which is like mathematics is number, numbers in time is music, numbers in space is geometry, and numbers in space and time is like astronomy. And so you have the abstractions of language and the concepts and ideas of the air element and then the water element has this number and time, which is associated with music and emotion. And so music is a language of emotion and it also is this expression of numbers and time. And so you get this juxtaposition of the water element and the air element of these two contrasting elements that are battling between the heart and soul of the music of what it's representing versus the kind of colonizing mind of the air element that tends to discern and separate and concepts and ideas that tend to disconnect people rather than unify people. So you kind of have this inherent tension between those two elements that are happening throughout the course of this film and even how the story is being told. So those are all the different things that I just want to kind of bear witness to and those kind of more elemental qualities of the sense of presence that I get when I watch a film like this.
[00:28:04.133] Wonder Bright: I want to bear witness to the editor. I don't understand what you did, but I understand that it was a masterful layering of sound and visuals and bringing it all together. And actually, my memory is that his name was first in the end credits before the director, which I think goes some way towards an acknowledgement of how profound his editing skills were. His name is Rik Chaubet. And there is something about, you know, I mean, I've been living with you for a long time, and I watched the way that you were able to take in a lot of information. It's like, you're always looking at the trees, all the trees in the forest, and I'm always trying to find the forest so I can understand where the entrance and exit is. And you seem able to just be with the trees. And I feel like Rik Chaubet did that in this film, that there's just an experience of this intense diversity of life within this story and an effort to honor all of it.
[00:29:15.805] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I don't know if that's because I was taking pretty copious notes and doing some real time sensemaking and trying to puzzle together and piece together what the narrative was.
[00:29:24.691] Wonder Bright: I think you just generally have the capacity, you have quite a large capacity for taking in a lot of it. You receive a lot of information simultaneously and you get curious where I tend to shut down. Probably being with you for almost a decade now has given me more tolerance than I might once have had, but it's still, just, I have more appreciation for it.
[00:29:57.421] Kent Bye: And I think that kind of speaks to the thing that you were mentioning earlier of how I have so many more significations to things because I'm really working from the bottom up rather from the top down. So there's a way in which that I'm trying to use the contextual dimensions and use these more reductive component parts to come up with a larger story. And I feel like with your background of having been read to stories every day, growing up since you were 12 years old, there's something that, the story structures are maybe ingrained into your bones a little bit deeper than in mine, where I'm trying to use my engineering mind to piece together all the different components to tell the story. But I feel like this is an example where, you know, it's good that we're doing this together because, you know, we can try to, at the end of the day, come up with each of our perspectives on these different pieces. And like I said, this is a piece that is really pushing at the edge of innovation when it comes to how they're telling the story. Wonder Bright: Yeah. Kent Bye: So yeah, well, that's that's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the story all the way down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for our newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
