Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
Jan. 8, 2025
CAMP Rooftop
by Johan Grimonprez
150 mins| 2024|
7:00 pm
A story about the encounter of American Jazz and African decolonisation, via the UN and the CIA, with a lot of world around it. Featuring among others Patrice Lumumba, Krishna Menon, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Nikita Khrushchev, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Adou Elenga...
A VHS cassette sits somewhere in CAMP with the title Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.
A recent studio visitor writes:
Many of us remember when we were first exposed to Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the perhaps-too-prescient late-90s meditation on airplane hijacking that validated our obsession with archives, that turned archive fever into poetry. We relished its availability on Ubu. Some 25 years later, the white noise is black and blue with the pain of ongoing colonial violence, the editing techniques are refined, and the focus is both more ambitious and more urgent. While the assassination of Patrice Lumumba is the ostensible subject of Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, this is not a biopic and certainly not a hagiography. John Coltrane is quoted after seeing Malcolm X in Harlem: “I think music can create the initial change in the thinking of the people.” Soundtrack shows the betrayal of international governance and postcolonial sovereignty with the often-unwitting cooperation of American jazz greats, but instead of being merely another depressing portrait of Western power, the backbeat reminds us that political solidarity is a performance of heart with a furious rhythm—that art, humanity, and liberation are irresistibly linked.
- Rob M Ochshorn
As part of Around the World, Again, a season of new films at CAMP which explore configurations and revelations of "world", amidst a world in pieces.
This screening is now full and we can't accommodate any more RSVP, thanks.
