The Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat (2025): A Journey into Historical Immersion

Halfway through Johan Grimonprez’s documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat”, we are shown one of the most popular images in the canons of literary and media criticisms: René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. The painting, which is a drawing of a pipe with a caption reading “this is not a pipe”, is trying to say that there is a difference between an image of a thing and the thing itself. This is the core idea of semiotics: the study of signs as abstract signifiers, separated from what is being signified. 

But what is this painting doing in the middle of a documentary about the 1960 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo?

As a white Belgian, there is an irony in Grimonprez’s role in telling the story of a victim of his own country’s heinous crime. Perhaps in an effort to avoid appropriating the voice and agency of the Congolese people, the American civil rights movement, and the non-aligned movement, Grimonprez minimized the use of the omnipotent third-person narrator, relying instead on literally putting texts from historical documents on screens or displaying interviews and real footage.

(Credit: Mediawan Rights)

This sort of objective realism may have the unintended effect of obscuring the presence of the academic subject – rendering them transparent, as Spivak would put it. But the debate over Grimonprez’s role as a storyteller notwithstanding, “Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat” makes extremely effective use of historical footage, exploiting the lack of a third-person narrator not for the nebulous effect of so-called objective realism, but immersion into history. 

The story told is a grim one: as nationalism blooms in Africa and Asia, Belgium, the CIA, and the puppet UN security council effectively conspires to engineer a coup in the Congo, assassinating the popular nationalist Lumumba, in order to secure access to resources in the mineral-rich African nation. The exploitation continues to this day, as mines in Congo continue operating as backdrops to an unending conflict and expensive UN presence. 

The history of the Congo, unfiltered, conjures a sense of determinist history. Power always wins. The trajectory of the universe does not bend for morality. This kind of historical determinism can feel alienating to viewers. Knowing this, Grimonprez gives precedence to the role of struggles, revealing history to be contingent not only on the power broking of the corrupt and the capitalistic but the unending work of freedom fighters and activists.

The title of the documentary suggests Grimonprez’s intention to highlight the connection between the civil rights movement in the United States and the decolonization movement in the third world. Malcolm X and Abbey Lincoln is as much a character in the story as Khruschev and Gamal Abdul Nasser. The documentary highlights the hidden intersectionality of nationalism and Pan-Africanism: the tale of Andrée Blouin is perhaps the most unique storyline in the story.

Among the clearest pieces of evidence that Grimonprez is not trying to achieve ‘realism’ is the use of title cards to introduce historical figures – as if they’re characters in the Avengers or the Suicide Squad. This stylistic choice pairs extraordinarily well with the use of Jazz to punctuate dramatic moments. Classic jazz jams bring emotional weight to powerful moments in history, often imbuing them with new meanings, interpretations, and contexts.

This jazzy style can often come at a price of clarity, however. The straightforward presentation of dates and chronologies makes way for emotional arcs and musical momentum, which makes it difficult to follow the actual history sometimes. The documentary is also two and a half hours long, which can be trying, especially for those unfamiliar with the story.

Ultimately, “Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat” is a soundtrack: a backdrop, a representation. It resembles history in the same way that the image of a pipe resembles a pipe. While on the surface, the Treachery of Image is brought up in the documentary as a way to criticize the deception of CIA director Allen Dulles regarding the whole Congo affairs (and perhaps as a commentary on the use of radio and the media in engineering coups during the cold war), I suspect it is also a reminder to the audience that telling stories about history is not the same as experiencing it. Nevertheless – a good story has the unique power to pique people’s interests in real history. Ultimately, that’s the best a documentary can hope to do.