AILSA CHANG, HOST:
One of this year's Oscar-nominated documentaries focuses its lens and its ears on the past. It's called "Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat." Its subject is the year 1960 and the Western plot to overthrow one of Africa's first democratically elected leaders, Patrice Lumumba. Bilal Qureshi reports on how American jazz inspired and accompanied Africa's struggle for freedom.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMMING)
BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: "Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat" opens with a bang - restless drumming by Max Roach, to be exact, set to a rapid-fire montage of newsreels and full-screen quotes with footnotes.
B RUBY RICH: And so you get these gorgeous graphics just popping out of the screen.
QURESHI: Film critic B. Ruby Rich.
RICH: And it probably takes you the first five minutes to get your bearing and start to figure out that this, in fact, is the tempo of the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
UNIDENTIFIED NEWSREADER #1: President Eisenhower arrived for the 1960 session of the United Nations General Assembly, one of the most momentous diplomatic gatherings in modern history.
UNIDENTIFIED NEWSREADER #2: With its delegation yet to be seated, the Congo is the largest state to be admitted into the U.N. this year.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INNOSS'B: (Singing in non-English language).
RICH: I was in school back then, and I remember it seemed every month we had to redraw the map of Africa because there was a new country and the name has been changed. And so this moment in history is a very sexy moment.
QURESHI: 1960 is referred to as the Year of Africa, when 16 newly free African countries took their seat at the U.N. - a sexy moment with a soundtrack to match. Johan Grimonprez is the Belgian director of "Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat."
JOHAN GRIMONPREZ: While researching a pivotal moment - end of the '50s, beginning in the '60s, when that wave of independence blew over the continent of Africa - I found that music was inherently so much part of the history of that whole story. And I could not but make sort of music into the protagonist of the film. So that actually dictated how the film was constructed.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
ELLA FITZGERALD: (Vocalizing).
(APPLAUSE)
MALCOLM X: The ballot or the bullet?
HISHAM AIDI: It's a tremendous film. And it's dizzy, and it's overwhelming. It's furious.
QURESHI: Hisham Aidi teaches African cultural politics at Columbia University.
AIDI: It's an essay film, really. That's what it feels like.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
DUKE ELLINGTON: (Vocalizing).
QURESHI: And the theme of that essay is the global age of American jazz and the Civil Rights Movement, when Black anthems of freedom were ricocheting from Harlem to the streets of Ghana and Congo. Even the State Department was tuned in.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
LOUIS ARMSTRONG: (Singing) This is the voice of America - Washington, D.C.
QURESHI: Again, film critic B. Ruby Rich.
RICH: What we learn from the film is that the United States, in its attempt to win over the world from communism and from the Soviet Union, was sending musicians out around the world to promote the American side of the Cold War conflict.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
UNIDENTIFIED HOST, HOST:
Unofficial American ambassador of jazz, Dizzy Gillespie, one of the originators of that brand of jazz known as bebop.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
QURESHI: As Black artists from Gillespie to Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone were dispatched as jazz ambassadors, leaving Jim Crowe segregation at home to play in free African capitals. Music was being made, but behind the scenes, the political machinations were less harmonious, says Hisham Aidi.
AIDI: You have the freedom and idealism and truth-telling of jazz juxtaposed against the cynicism and double-talk of realpolitik.
QURESHI: A sweep of CIA plots to overthrow leaders, interventions - Cold War calculations.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
MALCOLM X: The Africanism is what they consider to be the real threat.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A soldier tries to stop (inaudible).
NINA SIMONE: (Singing) The rats have got your flour.
GRIMONPREZ: Throughout the whole film, you hear speeches and voiceovers that create the global context of that decolonization movement, but we zoom in in detail with what's going on in the Congo, where Patrice Lumumba has been overthrown.
QURESHI: As Grimonprez explains, within months of coming to power in Congo, Patrice Lumumba was overthrown, imprisoned and murdered, as the music played on. The role of the CIA and Belgium in the coup against Lumumba is documented in chilling detail on screen, with archival interviews, texts and detailed footnotes. Grimonprez says at times the film was at the risk of becoming a dense academic PDF.
GRIMONPREZ: But it seems that actually, it really crossed over to big audience and then ultimately the Oscar. I never had expected that - to be nominated - because I thought this is maybe a cryptic film, but not - I feel like people really relate to the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT")
SIMONE: (Singing) Let me fly away.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking French).
QURESHI: Film critic B. Ruby Rich says that's because with "Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat," director Johan Grimonprez has found a new way to both resurrect and remix the archive to explain the present with the undeniable music of the past. For NPR News, I'm Bilal Qureshi. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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