Category Archives: Saturday Matinee

Saturday Matinee: Men & Chicken

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By Sheila O’Malley

Source: RogerEbert.com

David Dencik and Mads Mikkelsen play estranged brothers Gabriel and Elias, respectively, in writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen’s bizarre “Men & Chicken.” The two men are thrown together when, after their father’s death, some family secrets come to light. The comedy in “Men & Chicken” sometimes tips into Keystone Cops territory, with people running around in the background like chickens (of course) with their heads cut off. “Men & Chicken” is a bizarre family psychodrama as well as a mad-scientist movie, complete with a crazy spooky lab full of terrifying objects. How seriously should any of it be taken? It’s hard to tell, but the film has a dry eccentricity that is entertaining and absurd. You don’t know what will happen next. If the hundreds of chickens clucking around in the movie revealed themselves as sentient beings with the power of speech it wouldn’t be a surprise at all. In the world of “Men & Chicken,” all manner of ridiculous things seem possible. 

Gabriel and Elias set off together on a road trip to the isolated Ork Island (population 42) to seek out the brothers they never knew they had. Both have cleft palates as well as personality quirks (putting it mildly), and they can barely get through a conversation without running into intractable conflict. They have circular arguments about Darwin and Einstein. (“Einstein won the Nobel Prize, Elias.” “Yes. In 1921, the lamest year in physics.”) Elias is first seen on a date with a woman in a wheelchair who makes the fatal error of accidentally interrupting him. He snaps, “Do all people in wheelchairs interrupt this much?” Not surprisingly, Elias has no luck with women, particularly unfortunate for him since his sex drive is so titanic that he needs to masturbate multiple times a day. Elias’ “condition” is treated matter-of-factly by his brother (who pulls over to the side of the road to let Elias get out and do his thing behind a tree). Gabriel is a philosophy professor who dry-retches and gags every other minute for unknown reasons.

Elias and Gabriel track down their three half-brothers holed up in a dilapidated former sanitarium, overrun by chickens, ducks, goats. The brothers call to mind the locals in “Deliverance“: They are barely civilized, beating one another (and Gabriel when he first approaches) with huge dead birds or slabs of wood. They threaten each other with “the cage” for rule infractions. It’s a madhouse. They all have cleft palates and other physical abnormalities and live in a raw state of nature (putting the lie to Rousseau’s theories). They are petty, vicious, savage, rule-bound. Interrupting one another is strictly forbidden. 

The sanitarium is an incredible and inherently cinematic location, utilized beautifully by Jensen. There are echoing long hallways, mysterious upstairs rooms and an off-limits basement. There is no electricity. The brothers play badminton in one room, all wearing tennis whites, and they treat the game as seriously as a World Cup match. At any time, a fist fight could break out. Every night they curl up by the fire and have a bedtime story hour, where they discuss plot points and character analysis, and nobody is allowed to interrupt anyone else, and of course nobody can obey that rule perfectly. The family unit is a tinderbox. The ensemble acting is terrific.

Gabriel, determined to find answers about their shared background, tries to wrestle the wild brothers under control. Elias, however, takes to the chaos like a duck to water. Within 24 hours, he’s dressed up in tennis whites playing badminton as though he had lived there all his life. He never wants to leave. 

Mads Mikkelsen, an exquisite actor, so elegant, controlled and frightening as Hannibal on NBC’s “Hannibal,” is barely recognizable as the constant-masturbator Elias. He’s got a haircut and a mustache reminiscent of Christopher Walken’s sleazy look in “At Close Range.” But it’s not just the externals that make him unrecognizable. Elias is chatty, impulsive, rude, irritated by his frustrated sex drive. Mikkelsen, as Elias, is always thinking, processing, eyes shifting around as he takes in new information. He thinks so much more than he says, and that’s one of the reasons that the performance is so funny. It’s not strange just for the sake of being “wacky” or “quirky.” Mikkelsen has made sense of Elias, and has connected all of those disparate pieces to create a very real character. Humphrey Bogart once said that good acting was six feet back in the eyes. Mikkelsen goes that deep, and that’s why he is so transformed. Elias is so strange that one might struggle to place him, or compare him to someone else. But he is his own thing, and you can’t take your eyes off of him. 

Strange motifs and themes emerge and recur: copious ejaculation, dead birds, evolutionary mutations, hybrid breeds, survival of the fittest, inherited characteristics. Nature creates “monsters,” and man can create monsters of his own. Jensen uses horror movie tropes: strange things glimpsed at night, closed doors, phonographs playing in empty rooms. But there are farcical elements too: the brothers running around the sanitarium wielding badminton rackets, the repeated beatings with a stiff dead bird and the casual discussions afterwards (“I’m not mad at you for beating Gabriel with the mute swan. It happens to the best of us.”) There’s also a grotesque element, in the traditional sense of the word: “freaks,” cages, mutations limping through their lives. What was their father up to? What’s with the cleft palates? What is in that basement? At some point, is someone going to sexually assault a chicken? It is discussed as a valid option. 

Audience members looking for a character to “relate to” or “like” may have a rough time. But nobody is likable in farce or absurdist black comedy: it’s not that kind of genre, nor should it be. What does all of this add up to? Damned if I know. But it’s fun to see a film that plays by its own rules to such a degree that any comparison to anything else falls apart.

Watch Men & Chicken on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/13448329

Saturday Matinee: The New Cinema

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Watch: Rare 1960s Documentary ‘The New Cinema’ Featuring Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas & More

By Gary Garrison

Source: IndieWire

Hollywood leaves a lot to be desired in terms of innovation. Studios tend to find something that works, and then squeeze out every penny possible. The viability of these brainless practices aside, it takes quite a bit for the town to even consider greenlighting an original property, let alone a complete restructuring.

But a restructuring is exactly what happened in Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s, despite the laborious pace of the shift (compared to what was happening in Europe), and all the resulting resistance. “The New Cinema,” a short documentary produced sometime in the late 1960s (the exact date is unknown) has found new life on the Internet recently and takes an in depth look at the old Hollywood system and the new crowd of directors who were on the verge of starting one of the great cinematic rebirths.

Directed by Gary Young, “The New Cinema” features some great impromptu interviews from the likes of Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, Dustin Hoffman, Francis Ford Coppola, and the up-and-coming at the time George Lucas. And while the doc is interesting in its own right, it’s amazing to see this particular collection of filmmakers, most of whom would make some of the greatest movies in history.

Saturday Matinee: What the Future Sounded Like

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What the Future Sounded Like: Documentary Tells the Forgotten 1960s History of Britain’s Avant-Garde Electronic Musicians

By Josh Jones

Source: Open Culture

It really is impossible to overstate the fact that most of the music around us sounds the way it does today because of an electronic revolution that happened primarily in the 1960s and 70s (with roots stretching back to the turn of the century). While folk and rock and roll solidified the sound of the present on home hi-fis and coffee shop and festival stages, the sound of the future was crafted behind studio doors and in scientific laboratories. What the Future Sounded Like, the short documentary above, transports us back to that time, specifically in Britain, where some of the finest recording technology developed to meet the increasing demands of bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

Much less well-known are entities like the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, whose crew of engineers and audio scientists made what sounded like magic to the ears of radio and television audiences. “Think of a sound, now make it,” says Peter Zinovieff “any sound is now possible, any combination of sounds is now possible.” Zinovieff, London-born son of an émigré Russian princess and inventor of the hugely influential VCS3 synthesizer in 1969, opens the documentary—fittingly, since his technology helped power the futuristic sound of progressive rock, and since, together with the Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, he ran Unit Delta Plus, a studio group that created and promoted electronic music.

Also appearing in the documentary is Tristram Cary, who, with Zinovieff, founded Electronic Music Studios, one of four makers of commercial synthesizers in the late sixties, along with ARP, Buchla, and Moog. Zinovieff and Carey are not household names in part because they didn’t particularly strive to be, preferring to work behind the scenes on experimental forms and eschewing popular music even as their technology gave birth to so much of it. The aristocratic Zinovieff and pipe-smoking, professorial Carey hardly fit in with the crowd of rock and pop stars they inspired.

In hindsight, however, Zinovieff desires more recognition for their work. “One thing which is odd, is that there’s a missing chapter, which is EMS, in all the books about electronic music. People do not know what incredible mechanical adventures we were up to.” Those adventures included not only creating new technology, but composing never-before-heard music. Both Zinovieff and Carey continue to create electronic scores, and Carey happens to be one of the first adopters in Britain of musique concrète, the proto-electronic music pioneered in the 1940s using tape machines, microphones, filters, and other recording devices, along with found sounds, field recordings, and ad hoc instruments made from non-instrument objects. (See examples of these techniques in the clip above from the 1979 BBC documentary The New Sound of Music.)

Many of the sounds that emerged from Britain’s electronic music founders came out of the detritus of World War II. Carey’s first serious studio design, he says, “coincided with the post-war appearance of an enormous amount of junk from the army, navy, and air force. For someone who knew what to do, and could handle a soldering iron, and could design audio equipment, even if you only had 30 shillings in your pocket, you could get something.” With their knowledge of electronics and hodge-podge of technology, Carey and his compatriots were designing an avant-garde electronic “high modernity,” author Trevor Pinch declares. “I think you can think of people like Tristan Carey as dreaming of a future soundscape of London.” Nowadays, those sounds are as familiar to us as the music piped over the speakers in restaurants and shops. One wonders what the future after the future these pioneers designed will sound like?

Saturday Matinee: Three Thousand Years of Longing

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By Katie Carter

Source: Katie at the Movies

Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) inhabits the perfect role in a movie that’s a story about telling stories. She works in the equally fictional-sounding position of narratologist, specializing in myths and legends, and while she resides and teaches in London, at the start of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” she’s arriving in Istanbul for a conference. Writer and director George Miller based his movie on the title story in A.S. Byatt’s 1994 anthology “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” but it’s apparent early on that “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is as much a personal, affectionate tribute to the power of story as it is a fantasy about the highs and lows of love and desire. When Alithea arrives at her hotel in Istanbul, she’s surprised with a stay in the Agatha Christie suite, where the famed mystery writer reportedly penned her most renowned work, “Murder on the Orient Express.” At a lecture, she and a colleague delve into how comic book superheroes comprise our modern myths, a graphic prominently featuring Superman displayed behind her. And at a curio shop in this ancient city from which stemmed some of the world’s most oft-told tales, Alithea buys a pretty little vase she digs out from beneath a pile of knick-knacks.

It’s after she returns to her hotel room that Alithea becomes a part of those stories that so much of her life seems to revolve around. While scrubbing the dirty bottle, she inadvertently pops its top and unleashes billowing clouds of purple smoke that coalesce into an enormous, human-like being: a djinn (Idris Elba). After the djinn gets situated, quickly catching up on the current culture and language by examining Alithea’s laptop and TV, he informs Alithea that she needs to make three wishes— her heart’s desire, with some limitations— because after he grants them he will finally be free. It’s the sort of opportunity most people would leap at, but Alithea is flummoxed. She, ever practical, has no heart’s desire— at least, she doesn’t think she does. In her narration that opens the film, she states that she is alone (no spouse, no children) and likes it that way. We later discover through her conversations with the Djinn that she was married, once, but that she and her husband grew apart and he eventually left her for another woman, a child lost before it was even born implied to be the impetus for their downward spiral.

But moreover, because she is so well-verses in myths, Alithea knows what the Djinn is capable of, and of what follies can come of indulging in his powers. To catch her up on how he came to be her in possession, the Djinn tells Alithea three stories: three stories of love, and how the actions love spurred him to caused him to end up back inside the bottle every time, spanning from three thousand years ago to the time of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to palace concubine Gülten (Ece Yüksel) in the time of the Ottoman Prince Mustafa in the 1500s, to the intelligent and fiery Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), a woman thirsty for knowledge and stuck in a passionless marriage to a much older man. Like most anthologies, these extended flashbacks framed as the Djinn telling Alithea stories as they huddle in her room occasionally miss the mark, but it’s difficult not to be drawn in by Miller’s beguiling concoction of fantasy and history, especially when Elba is the storyteller, his low voice conveying the tinges of sadness and regret over his past that provide the emotional beats the narrative sorely needs. The spell-binding visuals don’t hurt either. Some of the computer effects aren’t too convincing, but cinematographer John Seale (who Miller lured out of retirement for 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” and again to work on “Three Thousand Years”) works his magic, whirling the viewer over vast landscapes and elaborate palace interiors and in and out of the Djinn’s perspective. Exhilarating cinema is crafted even from the scenes where the characters are mostly sedentary. He keeps the camera moving even when characters are just sitting in a car, or following Alithea out of the airport. Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and frequent collaborator, serves as editor and enhances the camerawork even more with her cuts, a series of match cuts in the aforementioned sequence, for example, tracing the wheels of the plane touching down, to the wheels of Alithea’s baggage cart as she disembarks.

It’s when “Three Thousand Years” turns into its overlong fourth act after the stories have been told that it becomes a much more trying affair. Alithea discovers that she does want to make a wish, as much to her surprise as it is to the viewer. Miller’s attempt to end on a big swing for romance is admirable, but the change in Alithea is too abrupt, and the romantic chemistry between Swinton and Elba, talented performers though they are (I mean, who else could play a a woman named Alithea Binnie but Swinton?), is too flat when it ought to sizzle. The issue of the film’s exoticism of people of color, a problem that haunts the otherwise fantastical images Miller conjures in his imaginings of Middle Eastern countries and peoples throughout, takes on an even more troubling edge in this chapter as well. Perhaps being a magical being like a Djinn means he transcends race, but Elba’s character is essentially repressed by a white woman for an extended period of time, existing to serve her but not able to be his own person because of that. Of course, that’s part of the film’s lesson—that love must grow organically and not be forced, so that by the end of the movie the Djinn spends time with Alithea of his own volition— but the casting of a Black man and a white woman in these specific roles automatically casts a problematic shadow over the relationship.

Despite issues that make for an underwhelming experience, I kind of love that “Three Thousand Years Longing” is the movie Miller chose to make in between his acclaimed— and dare I say, revolutionary?— “Fury Road,” and his upcoming prequel to that film, “Furiosa.” Proving over and over throughout his career that he is as adept at creating charming family fare (“Babe,” “Happy Feet”) as he is gritty dystopian action movies, Miller marries the two here for a story that, for all the tragedies it contains, is too in love with love and with the creation and telling of tales to ever feel cynical. And it’s a real family affair as well; in addition to Sixel, Miller collaborated on the screenplay with his daughter, Augusta Gore. That affection that exists in the very fabric of the film’s creation is reflected on screen, because for all its faults, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” above all makes it clear that it is never too late to open up to love.

Watch Three Thousand Years of Longing on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100046863/three-thousand-years-of-longing

Saturday Matinee: Network

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

Strange, how Howard Beale, “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” dominates our memories of “Network.” We remember him in his soaking-wet raincoat, hair plastered to his forehead, shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The phrase has entered into the language.

But Beale (Peter Finch) is the movie’s sideshow. The story centers on Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), the ratings-hungry programming executive who is prepared to do anything for better numbers. The mirror to which she plays is Max Schumacher (William Holden), the middle-age news executive who becomes Diana’s victim and lover, in that order.

The movie has been described as “outrageous satire” (Leonard Maltin) and “messianic farce” (Pauline Kael), and it is both, and more. What is fascinating about Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay is how smoothly it shifts its gears. The scenes involving Beale and the revolutionary “liberation army” are cheerfully over the top. The scenes involving Diana and Max are quiet, tense, convincing drama. The action at the network executive level aims for behind-the-scenes realism; we may doubt that a Howard Beale could get on the air, but we have no doubt the idea would be discussed as the movie suggests. And then Chayefsky and the director, Sidney Lumet, edge the backstage network material over into satire, too–but subtly, so that in the final late-night meeting where the executives decide what to do about Howard Beale, we have entered the madhouse without noticing.

The movie caused a sensation in 1976. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, won four (Finch, Dunaway, supporting actress Beatrice Straight, Chayefsky), and stirred up much debate about the decaying values of television. Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?

Parts of the movie have dated–most noticeably Howard Beale’s first news set, a knotty-pine booth that makes it look like he’s broadcasting from a sauna. Other parts, including the network strategy meetings, remain timeless. And the set that Beale graduates to, featuring soothsayers and gossip columnists on revolving pedestals, nicely captures the feeling of some of the news/entertainment shows, where it’s easier to get air time if you’re a “psychic” than if you have useful information to convey.

Most people remember that Howard Beale got fed up, couldn’t take it anymore and had a meltdown on the air. It wasn’t quite like that. Beale is portrayed as an alcoholic doing such a bad job that he’s fired by his boss (Holden). Then they get drunk together and joke about him committing suicide on the air. The next day, in a farewell broadcast, Beale announces that he will indeed kill himself because of falling ratings. He’s yanked from the air but begs for a chance to say farewell, and that’s when he says, the next day, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bull- – – -.” His frankness is great for the ratings, Diana convinces her bosses to overturn Max’s decision to fire him, Howard goes back on the air, and he is apparently deep into madness when he utters his famous line.

Lumet and Chayefsky know just when to pull out all the stops. After Beale orders his viewers to “repeat after me,” they cut to exterior shots of people leaning out of their windows and screaming that they’re mad as hell, too. Unlikely, but great drama, and electrifying in theaters at the time. Beale’s ratings skyrocket (he is fourth after “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “All in the Family” and “Phyllis”), and a new set is constructed on which he rants and raves after his announcer literally introduces him as a “mad prophet.”

Counter to this extravagant satire is the affair between Max and Diana. Dunaway gives a seductive performance as the obsessed programming executive; her eyes sparkle and she moistens her lips when she thinks of higher ratings, and in one sequence she kisses Max while telling him how cheaply she can buy some James Bond reruns. Later, in bed, discussing ratings during sex, she climaxes while gasping about the “Mao Tse Tung Hour.”

That’s her idea for a prime-time show based on the exploits of a group obviously inspired by the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a secluded safe house, she negotiates with its armed leader, has a run-in with a Patty Hearst type, and uses an Angela Davis type as her go-between. This material is less convincing, except as an illustration of the lengths to which she will go.

Much more persuasive is Holden’s performance as a newsman who was trained by Edward R. Murrow, and now sees his beloved news division destroyed by Diana. At the same time, Max is fascinated by her, and deliberately begins an affair. For him, it is intoxication with the devil, and maybe love. For her–it is hard to say what it is, because, as he accurately tells her at the end, “There’s nothing left in you I can live with.”

Beatrice Straight’s role as Max’s wife is small but so powerful it won her the Oscar. It is a convincing portrait of a woman who has put up with an impossible man for so long that, although she feels angry and betrayed, she does not feel surprised. The meaning of Max’s decision to cheat is underlined by the art direction; he and his wife live in a tasteful apartment with book-lined walls, and then he moves into Dunaway’s tacky duplex. It is clear that although she cares how she dresses (costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge), she doesn’t care where she lives, because she is not a homebody; her home is in a boardroom, a corner office or a control booth.

The film is filled with vivid supporting roles. Ned Beatty has a sharp-edged cameo as a TV executive (he’s the one who says the famous line, “It’s because you’re on television, dummy”). Robert Duvall plays an executive who, when murder is suggested, insists he wants to “hear everybody’s thoughts on this.” Wesley Addy is the handsome, gray-haired executive in the network’s display window; he looks good at stockholder meetings. (If you look closely, you can spot a young Tim Robbins as a revolutionary assassin.)

One of Chayefsky’s key insights is that the bosses don’t much care what you say on TV, as long as you don’t threaten their profits. Howard Beale calls for outrage, he advises viewers to turn off their sets, his fans chant about how fed up they are–but he only gets in trouble when he reveals plans to sell the network’s parent company to Saudi Arabians. There’s a parallel here with “The Insider,” a 1999 film about CBS News, where “60 Minutes” can do just about anything it wants to, except materially threaten CBS profits.

Sidney Lumet, born 1924, a product of the golden age of live television, is one of the most consistently intelligent and productive directors of his time. His credits are an honor roll of good films, many of them with a conscience, including “12 Angry Men” (1957), “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), “Fail-Safe” (1964), “Serpico” (1973), “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Prince of the City” (1981), “The Verdict” (1982), “Running on Empty” (1988) and “Q and A” (1990).

Because he works in many different genres and depends on story more than style, he is better known inside the business than out, but few directors are better at finding the right way to tell difficult stories; consider the development of Al Pacino’s famous telephone call in “Dog Day Afternoon.” His book Making Movies (Knopf, 1995) has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.

In “Network,” which is rarely thought of as a “director’s picture,” it is his unobtrusive skill that allows all those different notes and energy levels to exist within the same film. In other hands, the film might have whirled to pieces. In his, it became a touchstone.

Saturday Matinee: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

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By Robert Daniels

Source: RogerEbert.com

To see the archival footage of Patrice Lumumba, which serves as the backbone to the forceful documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” is to witness a daring future that, due to the rot of colonialism, tragically never came to pass. The foil to the film’s incisive use of newsreels, excerpts from biographies and political speeches is the kinetic wielding of jazz music.

On October 28, 1960, for instance, Louis Armstrong jubilantly arrived in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville (renamed Kinshasa in 1966) to perform. He came to a country that has always mystified the Euro-centric imagination as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of the Congo’s bid for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s performance, with the murder of Lumumba, the dream had already died.

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s dense, encyclopedic film “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does more than tell viewers about the downfall of a revolution, one that conceived of a pan-African movement composed of a dozen countries that gained independence from their colonial overlords. It tells viewers how industrialist countries, primarily in the West, are still picking the bones of a broken promise decades later. 

It’s difficult to watch Grimonprez’s intuitive telling of history without feeling the sinister truth of world history: the major powers of the world only see countries like the Congo as an exploitable resource, not as a sovereign state. To tell this reality, Grimonprez takes a similar path traversed by Raoul Peck, whose documentary “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet” is an incredible portrait of a defiant man. Grimonprez dives into the immense span of available footage and writing about Lumumba and that brief period when the idea of a United States of Africa, as coined by Marcus Garvey, to tell how the Congo gained its independence and lost Lumumba. 

Nevertheless, the use of music sets Grimonprez’s film apart from Peck’s survey. Similar to the improvisational spirit of jazz, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” isn’t a linear film. It hops and it bops from 1961 to contemporary ads for Tesla and Apple. The same could be said about the murderer’s row of Jazz legends: Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Armstrong—who take center stage. Grimonprez isn’t terribly interested in laying the biographical groundwork of these figures; they’re iconic enough to allow their aura to provide the documentary with an inherent mood and presence. That built-in tenor is necessary in a film that requires plenty of reading with excerpts from Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, and In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament (Bofane reads passages from his book that speak to world powers’ desire to command the country’s uranium supply).

It’s the latter angle that forms the film’s central thesis. True independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers afraid to part from the unchecked wealth they gained through ultra-violent oppression. Grimonprez, in fact, looks toward Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal from the British as a potential parallel for the kind of reclaiming of natural resources that other African countries like Congo would’ve sought. Nasser is just one of the many predictions Grimonprez bridges as he crafts a comprehensive view to demonstrate how world powers used Cold War fears to justify assassinations and coups. 

The film examines the burgeoning rebellion by these newly independent countries from many angles. For instance, through the analysis of Malcolm X, we find that Asian and African countries possessed outsized power in the UN, whereby anytime they stuck together as a coalition, they could vote down countries like the United States, Belgium, or Britain. And even before she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol, Andrée Blouin, whose home movies and book My Country, Africa are referenced in the film, mobilized African women for political change. As the film informs us, this sense of collective mobilization further frightened world powers. 

That anxiety, posits the film, is why music, specifically jazz, became a conduit for political purposes. Grimonprez can be winking, especially when he introduces the Cabinet of Jazz; he and editor Rik Chaubet can also be spontaneous, weaving in and out from any given performance into a narrativization of history that often recalls a late-night setlist. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Lullaby of the Leaves,” for instance, becomes a playful way to pose Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the U.S. to meet President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a meeting between two kindred spirits. On the other hand, Nina Simone visiting Nigeria in 1961 on behalf of the American Society of African Culture, a group whose connection to the CIA was unknown by Simone, demonstrates the underhanded ways these artists were pitted against regimes they supported by menacing imperialists.   

Even when “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” which runs at a chunky 150 minutes, struggles to maintain a snappy rhythm, this documentary has an enthralling boldness. This film pushes its audience to absorb every note, clip, and quote that crams an entire study of information into an elegant, slick package. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, giving breath to Lumumba’s spirit by sporting the same kind of defiance the political leader espoused.

Watch Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/14940555