Soundtrack to a Coup D’État

 

Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars

Patrice Lumumba

Max Roach

Andrée Blouin

Malcolm X

CIA director Allen Dulles with his everpresent pipe

Director Johan Grimonprez

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÉTAT                   A-                                                       Belgium  France  Netherlands  (150 mi)  2024  d: Johan Grimonprez

History is the lie commonly agreed upon.                                                                                      —Voltaire

A stark assessment of how little we actually know about modern day history, where everything is cloaked in secrecy, as truth is a liability, telling one tale for public consumption while undermining that exact same position behind-the-scenes.  Nothing new was shot for this film, as it’s all drawn from existing archival material, a truly radical, formally inventive effort, as the amount of research involved here is truly extraordinary, where the entire film consists of footage not shown when the events were happening, providing a glimpse behind the headlines of what the media was not telling you.  Meticulously examining the 1961 assassination of Congo’s newly elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, where not much was known or written at the time, the film documents each and every source, looking behind the curtain at what really happened, creating a chilling portrait of the cruel manipulation of international affairs, where it’s all about the art of deception.  Using American jazz as a connecting thread, including live performance footage, with improvisational music fueling a free form, avant garde, cinematic collage approach, this is something we haven’t really seen before, yet the scholarship in breaking down the various political smokescreens is impressive, using eyewitness accounts, official government memos, recorded United Nations debates, testimonies from mercenaries, CIA operatives, British intelligence, and speeches from Lumumba himself, along with published memoirs by Congolese activists and writers.  The compelling subject matter is dense and often difficult to watch, juxtaposed against various jazz compositions that act as an underlying narrative, from Abbey Lincoln’s haunting rendition of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite YouTube (9:08), a Civil Rights anthem, perhaps the best-known jazz work with explicitly political content, to the deeply soulful Nina Simone - Wild Is The Wind (Live In New York 1964) YouTube (7:00), or her jazzy rendition of a Bob Dylan anthem, The Ballad of Hollis Brown - Nina Simone 1965 YouTube (6:10), which starts and ends the film, to a Congolese song of liberation by Joseph Kabasele, aka Le Grand Kallé, "Indépendance Cha-cha" - Congolese Independence Song YouTube (3:05), where the film is full of contradictions and bumps along the road, with no talking heads or voiceovers, featuring teeny, tiny, academic footnotes onscreen that are hard to read, yet essential for any continuing dialogue which this film hopes to inspire, while the film itself is also two and a half hours long.  Ostensibly a dissection of what was happening behind the scenes that led to the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose government was overthrown in a US-backed military coup, as he was kidnapped, beaten bloody, and tortured by his captors before facing a firing squad, pouring sulfuric acid on his body to prevent identification, saving only his gold teeth as war trophies, where the announcement of his death was withheld for over a month.  A rising star in Africa who essentially advocated a philosophy of Africa for Africans, aligned with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, beliefs that coincided with Malcolm X and many black jazz artists, as American black nationalist solidarity aligned with African liberation, Lumumba broke the yoke of colonialism while espousing freedom and democracy, beliefs that would normally be aligned with the West, sharing the same democratic principles, coming from hundreds of years of enslavement and colonialism, where the immediate outlook was bright, finally having their own country’s interests first and foremost.  But Lumumba posed a threat to the West precisely for those principles, as the West wasn’t ready to break the link of readily available resources coming from minerals that had been plundered from the African continent for centuries, which includes uranium, as the Congo mines were the main source of uranium used during the Manhattan Project to develop atom bombs and harness nuclear energy, a significant factor during the Cold War, where it’s no coincidence that this was happening at the height of the nuclear arms race.  The film addresses a diffuse mixture of base racism, colonial arrogance, and economic greed, less with agitational intent than as an enlightened treatise on injustice that remains just as relevant today.  The foremost film on colonialism is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), which exposed France’s unwillingness to stop its colonial occupation of Algeria, by force if necessary, part of the French colonial empire in Africa that they were unwilling to grant independence, but the Algerians successfully fought back, starting the spread of emancipation from multiple former African colonies, while stylistically, featuring so much archival footage, the film this most resembles is Chris Marker’s The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977).

Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator who studied anthropology, photography, and mixed media at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, receiving a Masters in Video and Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York, now teaching at the Belgian Royal Academy and the Film Institute in Amsterdam.  A child of the 60’s, he describes his films as “an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history.”  Known for his critical view of media, corruption, and propaganda, situating themselves at the intersections of art, cinema, documentary, and fiction, the critically acclaimed films and video installations of Grimonprez explore the mechanisms by which fear and ignorance are perpetuated and whipped up in the media.  Informed by a wealth of fully documented media sources, spending eight years researching the film and four years editing it, his work explores the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization, suggesting history has been infected by fear, which has tainted the political and social dialogue, providing instead new narratives to tell a story, where his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities.  With that in mind, this video essay film is about the promise of decolonization, the hope of the Non-Aligned Movement and the dream of self-determination, yet it is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in glove with the military-industrial complex to smother this very dream.  In a choice that might seem perplexing to some, jazz musicians are as prominent as the historical realities, featuring the distinguished voices of Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone, along with some of the giants of jazz, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Max Roach, Pérez Prado, and Melba Liston, among others, with Armstrong and Dizzy Gillepsie sent to Africa on a good will tour as Jazz ambassadors by the State Department, following earlier trips to the Soviet Union in the 50’s, spreading American values worldwide, though some might describe it as propaganda countering the influence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  Playing to more than two million Africans, with newspaper photos following the tour, they found themselves in the eye of the storm, peddling freedom while behind the scenes a myriad of westernized forces led by Belgium, Britain, and the United States, were undermining that very concept from being born in Africa, conspiring to assassinate one of the leading lights of the decolonial movement in Lumumba.  In September 1960, the Congo had entered the UN world body together with 16 other newly independent African countries, but on February 16, 1961, a month following Lumumba’s betrayal, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, writer Maya Angelou and 60 others crashed a UN Security Council meeting in protest of Lumumba’s murder, seen combatively fighting with security, while Belgian embassies around the world came under assault, with demonstrators pelting them with eggs or setting fires, where the hypocrisy of this heinous act was on full display around the world.  President Eisenhower, in an attempt to restore America’s image abroad, sent these jazz ambassadors to Africa, hoping to quell the storm, but when Louis Armstrong realized they were being duped, unknowing decoys in the CIA’s assassination plot, he got on the first plane home, back to a country where racial segregation was still enforced by the law.  Perfectly encapsulated by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, seen casually smoking his pipe, not to be confused with his older brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State at the time (with an airport named after him), with one brother sending the jazz musicians as camouflage while the other was concocting a murderous coup, this barrage of mixed messaging is an atypical yet clear-eyed interrogation of Western powers’ murderous collusions under the guise of liberal values, giving viewers a distinct view of just exactly what this meant at the time, where the effects of nation destabilization are still being felt today, as you can draw the parallel with current genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Gaza, and Yemen.  In Belgium, no one investigated their complicity in Lumumba’s murder for over forty years, establishing a parliamentary inquiry in 2001, classifying his murder as a war crime, concluding that Lumumba could not have been assassinated without the complicity of Belgian officers, backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, with Belgium bearing a ‘moral responsibility’ (Report Reproves Belgium in Lumumba's Death), leading to an official governmental apology in 2002.  To this day, there still isn’t much resource material available.  The film is a refresher course on geopolitics, as even sixty years later, armed groups continue to roam the countryside in the Congo threatening ordinary citizens, where according to a 2023 Amnesty International report (Human rights in Democratic Republic of the Congo):

Persistent large-scale attacks against civilians by armed groups and the Congolese security forces fuelled the humanitarian crisis in which nearly 7 million people were internally displaced and thousands of others fled the country.  Armed groups killed thousands of civilians, and the army carried out extrajudicial executions.  Sexual and gender-based violence remained prevalent, with over 38,000 reported cases in Nord-Kivu province alone during the first quarter of the year.  The rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association were routinely violated.  Journalists, opposition members and activists, among others, were subjected to arbitrary detention and faced unfair trials.  Mining projects in Lualaba province led to the forced eviction of thousands of people from their homes and livelihoods, while Indigenous Peoples faced eviction in the name of conservation.

Not unlike Swedish documentary filmmaker Göran Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 (2011), this film encourages thought-stimulating concerns about the international order and the way in which media and music shape our cultural worldview.  Some films have explored these subjects before, like Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (Hyènes) (1992), Peter Bate’s CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH (2003) or Hubert Sauper’s We Come As Friends (2014), where the dominant capitalistic interests are so overwhelmingly in favor of corporate interests like the oil companies, yet they hide their true objectives behind puppet African figureheads who have been given titles and positions of prominence in African “corporations” that have been formed only to bypass laws designed to exclude outsiders from obtaining controlling interests in what are African resources.  Initially there were two Congos, where one was a former French colonial area, while the other was the former Belgian colony.  African directors Mambéty and Ousmane Sembène were extremely suspicious of Western colonialist values and its allegiance to materialism corrupting the African shores since independence in the 1960’s, with Mambéty providing the central thrust of his film, suggesting Africans are “betraying the hopes of independence for the false promises of Western materialism… We have sold our souls too cheaply.  We are done for if we have traded our souls for money.”  Oreet Rees and Pippa Scott’s KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST (2006) exposed the systematic atrocities from Belgium’s 19th and 20th century colonial intrusion into the Congo, becoming the personal domain of Belgian King Leopold II, where they burned and destroyed up to a hundred local villages for rubber plantations, shooting anyone who disagrees, imprisoning the villagers for slave labor, kidnapping the wives of the working men, then cutting off the men’s hands if they resisted or if what they produced was too small, where the history of atrocities is horrendous, yet the underlying method behind this madness was purportedly “bringing civilization to the uncivilized.”  Instead they brought murders and mutilations, which have been historically passed down to subsequent generations, along with a swath of destroyed villages.  You may squirm when you hear then Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens literally speak of an inferior race of people while also claiming Belgium’s colonization of the Congo was “not to satisfy colonial or imperial aspirations but to complete a mission of civilization.”  This film also introduces the dark figure of Moïse Tshombe, a man Malcolm X described as “the worst African ever born,” a backstabbing Congolese official accusing Lumumba of communist leanings and dictatorial rule, leading a secessionist movement splitting the lucrative Union Minière mines Katanga region from the Congo solely for monetary gain, with the full support of Belgium who wanted to secure their interests, flying in paratroopers and surrounding the mines with paramilitary forces.  However, it was America’s rejection of Lumumba that forced his government into turning to the Soviet Union for help, as he inherited a disaster, with the Belgians emptying the coffers of the fledgling state and making sure the Congo never had a chance to develop, as they never trained their replacements, but just left in masse, with resignations in droves, leaving more than 25% of the country unemployed, having little other recourse due to the fragile nature of forming and running a government in a new nation, where allies and resources are essential.  The crisis that engulfed the Congo, impossibly complex, increasingly brutal, ended with a military coup and the three-decade rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a onetime Lumumba ally who went on to govern as a ruthless Western client.  The death of Lumumba, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians, Mobutu’s army coup, and Belgian “advisers,” with the tacit support of the CIA, the British M16, and the malign neglect of the United Nations, was a signal moment of both the Cold War and decolonization, two defining events of the postwar world, where Lumumba’s story, as depicted in the film, is the story of how they became inseparable, while also providing an expansive view of how the last vestiges of American imperialism, with its policy of meddling in the affairs of others, exactly as they were doing in Vietnam, literally destroyed Congo's hopes for independence.  Along with Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) and Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), we are constantly reminded that the deplorable impact left behind by colonialism is still with us today. 

Even after all these years, it’s simply amazing what was happening at the United Nations in 1960, given prominent exposure on the international stage, as world leaders routinely met on the biggest stage and actually discussed how to solve world problems, something that would seem unthinkable today, as the organization has been stripped of all power and significance, reduced to little more than clerical duties.  One of the stark revelations of the film is how Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro were viewed at the time as enemies of freedom and democracy, yet it is actually the Americans undermining the democracy movement in Africa, while Russia and Cuba, along with a host of African and Asian nations, were actually aligned against the colonial powers, namely Belgium, Britain, and the United States, in support of Africa’s attempts to break free from the devastating effects from centuries of colonialism plundering the resources of the African continent by brutality and force, with the CIA financing resistance armies that raped, killed, tortured, imprisoned, and mutilated African citizens who fought for freedom, assassinating democratically elected leaders, then installing puppet regimes to carry out policies that benefited their exclusive interests.  It’s rare to see Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X united in solidarity with Nikita Khrushchev.  It’s the 1950’s Cold War, anti-communist playbook that we’ve seen before in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, overthrowing an existing government that was preventing the flow of oil to the wealthiest nations like Britain and the United States, imprisoning the Prime Minister, placing him under house arrest, while installing the Shah of Iran, who eventually became a ruthless war criminal, or in Chile in 1973 with Salvador Allende, with the CIA assassinating the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America, then installing Augusto Pinochet as president, a ruthless dictator for twenty years who was ultimately charged with a litany of war crimes, with similar shenanigans also happening in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.  Yet this film focuses on Patrice Lumumba in 1960 immediately after obtaining their colonial independence from Belgium, a high profile leader who was simply extinguished for political expediency, reflective of how the world viewed blacks at the time, still believed to be inferior and subhuman, so his murder was seen as acceptable by agents acting on behalf of the CIA, the Belgium government, and the blatant neglect of the peacekeeping United Nations Operation in the Congo under UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (impossible to believe today, but he held one of the most powerful positions in the world at the time, commanding international respect), with the West labeling him a communist, a completely false accusation, but this demonizing and stigmatization allowed them to bulldoze over his pan-African beliefs, envisioning a unity of African nations, voicing his concerns at the independence handover ceremony, “We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over.”  This African solidarity was viewed as a threat to the West, with Lumumba replaced by a puppet government under Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who was a notoriously corrupt autocrat, amassing millions in personal wealth at the expense of the economic deterioration of his own country, where a brutal war left millions dead, using rape as a weapon of war, yet he was more sympathetic to Western interests, where the historic flow of colonial mining interests could continually be extracted out of Africa to the West, where it’s safe to say that not one Congolese has benefited from the wealth extracted from those mines except the kleptocracy running the country.  Countered by footage of Eisenhower’s public promises not to interfere in the policy of the Congo, the extent of just how much the United States resorted to lies and dirty tricks to covertly undermine newly formed democracies abroad is staggering. 

One of the other revelations is bringing to light an enigmatic figure that is barely known, remaining on the periphery of historical narratives that privilege the so-called founding fathers of African independence, with the film re-introducing Andrée Blouin, a mixed-race Congolese woman who threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, an activist and writer, as well as a dynamic, charismatic speaker, mobilizing the Democratic Republic of Congo’s women against colonialism, singlehandedly enrolling 45,000 people into the Congolese Independence Party, heading the women’s wing of the party where she worked to expand literacy, fight alcoholism, and for women’s and children’s rights, rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, actually trading ideas with famed revolutionaries and legendary postcolonial leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré, and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella.  These relationships led the European press to denigrate her as a shadowy communist and “whore,” often called the “Mata Hari of Africa,” a courtesan of powerful African politicians, completely representative of the historically racialized and sexualized representations of women of color in politics, belittling her intelligence and widespread influence, yet in the same breath she is also described as “the most dangerous woman in Africa,” much as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover in 1962 labeled Martin Luther King as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”  She experienced first-hand the deadly effects of racism at the hands of French colonizers, raised in an orphanage where she endured years of starvation, torture, and imprisonment, fleeing the orphanage at 15 to defy an arranged marriage, but it was as a young mother when the French colonial administration refused to allow her 2-year old son access to quinine, malaria medicine, claiming it was for Europeans only, an ill-fated decision that left her son dead within days, a traumatizing event that led to her radicalization, concluding that colonialism “was no longer a matter of my own maligned fate but a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life.”  What little we see of her onscreen is utterly fascinating, as all the other leaders are men, where she is viewed as the woman behind Lumumba, serving as his speechwriter, Chief of Protocol in the new government, and diplomatic liaison to European governments, yet her intelligence and profound influence are unmistakable, taking part in multiple struggles for independence across Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  At the time of Lumumba’s arrest, Blouin was sentenced to death as well but was able to flee the country, leaving her children behind, relocating to Algiers and later Paris.  While in exile, soldiers looted her family home and brutally beat her mother with a gun, permanently damaging her spine.  She wrote her own personal memoirs, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, published in 1983, an excerpt can be read here: How the West Destroyed Congo's Hopes for Independence, but it’s been out of print for decades, republished earlier this year following the release of this film, where cinema, much as it did with Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), or Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, is exposing forgotten and long-neglected female historical figures who were automatically assumed to be less important than the male figures surrounding them, whose contributions never received their due during their lifetimes. 

Where Jazz & Espionage Collide | Soundtrack to a Coup D ...  Greg Lemley video interview with director Johan Grimonprez from Inside the Arthouse, YouTube (42:32)

Marley

Door of No Return

sugar cane cutters

 

Bob and Rita

Bob and Rita

I-Threes

Bunny Wailer

Cindy Breakspeare

Bob and Cindy

Cindy Breakspeare

Rita Marley

Ziggy Marley

Cedella Marley

Allan “Skill” Cole

Director Kevin Macdonald

MARLEY             B+                                                                                                                Great Britain  USA  (145 mi)  2012  d: Kevin Macdonald

I think what’s great about the film is though there have been a lot of things done on Bob, I think this one will give people a more emotional connection to Bob’s life as a man – not just as a reggae legend or a mythical figure, but his life as a man.

—Ziggy Marley

Maker of superb documentaries that include Academy Award winner ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER (1999), the extraordinary TOUCHING THE VOID (2003), the equally compelling Whitney (2018), and also the Idi Amin historical drama LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (2006), this documentary was made with the full co-operation of the Marley family, told in chronological order, filling in the void of his relatively unknown early life, where the director was surprised to discover there’s not a single piece of footage from the first ten years of his performing career from 1962 to 1972, and only a handful of photographs, despite having five of the top 10 singles on the Jamaican charts early in his career with the Wailers, as no one really took them seriously.  Nonetheless, film and music buffs looking for an immersive portrait of all things associated with Bob Marley will be satiated by this sprawling documentary offering an expansive, richly layered collage of music, vintage archives, partly unpublished material, including rare recordings of Marley songs and live performances, and numerous interviews old and new, feeling like a definitive portrait of the reggae legend.  One of the driving forces behind this film is to uncover the mystery surrounding the enduring appeal of Bob Marley, a rare Third World superstar who remains as popular as ever some forty years after his death, where royalties alone account for $25 to $30 million dollars per year for his family, where there are currently more than 12 million streams monthly on Spotify alone (Bob Marley Would Be Highest Earning Music Legend On ...), with over 6 million followers on his Instagram account, and more than 33 million fans on Facebook and Twitter, so he’s a greater, weightier presence today than he ever was when alive, an enigma that is never fully explained.  While the religious and political impact of his life have too often been overlooked, there’s a surprisingly small amount of concert footage, and few if any songs play in their entirety.  Executive Producers on the film include Marley’s son Ziggy and Island Records founder and record producer Chris Blackwell, both of whom appear in the film, though the majority of the input comes from step-brother Bunny Wailer (aka Neville Livingston), describing Marley’s early childhood, as both were raised in the green hills of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish with no electricity, living under the same roof at one point in Kingston, Neville Garrick, the artistic director, graphic designer, and friend of Bob Marley who created the sleeve artwork for many of his albums, including Exodus, and also Cindy Breakspeare, Marley’s primary girlfriend since the mid 70’s when she was crowned Miss World 1976, who was all but omitted in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s recent release Bob Marley: One Love (2024).  These figures are onscreen more than the others, offering their own personal insight, expounding on what they know, suggesting they may have known him best.  Rita Marley, Bob’s Cuban-born wife, and Judy Mowatt, two of the I-Threes, the background vocalists for Marley onstage, and daughter Cedella Marley are also prominent figures, though Rita refuses to dwell on any of her husband’s personal transgressions, preferring to honor his eternal optimism, and instead inhabits the earth mother role of guardian angel holding everyone together, providing the necessary stability through fractured times.    

While this is the most comprehensive presentation of Bob Marley’s life that we have ever seen onscreen, taking us on a tour from Jamaica to America to London and on to Japan, Gabon, Zimbabwe, and Germany, what this film excels at is providing a thorough examination of Marley’s childhood and formative years, even finding his first music teacher, discovering he was bullied for being mixed race, as he had an older white father, Norval Marley, who was a British colonial officer who never recognized him as his son.  That family refusal obviously pained him as a kid, angrily writing a song about it, where the lyric “The stone that the builders refused will always be the head cornerstone” is adapted from The Book of Psalms, 118:22, as Macdonald can be seen playing it for the “white” Marley family, Bob Marley - Corner Stone - YouTube (2:25), who are themselves a bit flummoxed about the rising celebrity of a black cousin they never knew.  Dropping out of school to become a musician, spending all of his time in pursuit of that goal, Marley moved to the Trenchtown neighborhood of Kingston, where some of the introductory music he recorded in the early 60’s is simply not well known, including his first recorded song, released on the eve of independence, Bob Marley - Judge Not [1962] - YouTube (2:27) which made him realize going solo was much more difficult, instead forming a group with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh called the Teenagers, which evolved into the Wailing Rudeboys, the Wailing Wailers and finally just the Wailers, a throwback to the doo-wop American groups, where the intricate harmony is sophisticated, emulating the sound of the Drifters, the Platters, the Impressionists, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, or Dion & the Belmonts singing NEW * A Teenager In Love - Dion & The Belmonts {Stereo} YouTube (2:39).  They were encouraged by Joe Higgs, a popular artist and influential figure in Jamaica for four decades who produced a countless amount of Jamaican artists over the years, a man who was instrumental in the foundation of modern Jamaican music, also known as the Father or Grandfather of reggae who encouraged young talent, working with Jimmy Cliff, acting as his bandleader, even writing songs for him, while also performing for the Wailers during their American tour when Bunny Wailer dropped out.  Island record producer Chris Blackwell wanted the Wailers to tour freak clubs in the United States for no money, only exposure, with Wailer leaving the band for spiritual reasons, claiming it was against his Rastafari principles.  It’s perhaps telling that Marley chose to follow the traditional music business pathways to fame and stardom, hard touring, selling his songs to other performers, letting the record company have their way even while his original Wailer cohorts, Peter Tosh (who seems to want nothing to do with this film, derogatorily describing Blackwell as Chris Whitewell) and Bunny Wailer, rejected this “sell-out” trajectory of exploitive commercialism, with Chris Blackwell acknowledging Marley’s early recordings were “pasteurized” for easier consumption.  Staying true to their roots, according to Higgs, it was out of the poverty and violence in Kingston’s shantytowns such as Trenchtown and Johnstown that reggae music was born.

Music is a matter of struggle.  It’s not good that it’s known you’re from Trenchtown.  Reggae is a confrontation of sound.  Reggae has to have that basic vibrant sound that is to be heard in the ghetto.  It’s like playing the drum and bass very loud.  Those are the basic sounds.  A classical reggae should be accepted in any part of the world.  Freedom, that’s what it's asking for, acceptance, that’s what it needs, and understanding, that’s what reggae’s saying.  You have a certain love come from hard struggle, long suffering.  Through pain you guard yourself with that hope of freedom, not to give up.   

Opening with ‘A Tuff Gong Production,’ the name of Marley’s record label, the film actually begins in Africa on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, the last moment on African soil during the Atlantic slave trade, passing through the “Door of No Return” where an estimated 10 to 20 million African slaves were shipped across the ocean on slave ships, the subject of Pierre-Yves Borgeaud’s Youssou N’Dour: Return to Gorée (Retour à Gorée) (2007) and this posted essay by Language Professor Dalla Malé Fofana, Senegal, the African Slave Trade, and the Door of No Return.  The slave trade in Jamaica was abolished in 1807 with the Slave Trade Act of 1807, but by then almost 2 million slaves were traded to Jamaica to run the sugar plantations, with tens of thousands dying on slave ships in the brutal middle passage between West Africa and the Caribbean.  After almost 250 years of rebellion and resistance, slavery itself was finally abolished in 1834 after the passage of The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.  This aspect of Jamaican history is interlinked with the history of reggae, where the roots of oppression are embedded in the music, with the director repeatedly referring to this “origin” of Bob Marley’s identity, as his biography cannot be separated from the colonial history of his homeland.  Marley is an artist aware of divine grace in his life, bringing a prophetic musical message of rebellion and redemption, who relentlessly synthesized the contradictions of perceived wisdom from his life experiences into potent lyrics that combine the utopian vision of Rastafari with recurrent themes of rejection and abandonment.  With songs like Bob Marley & The Wailers ‎- 400 Years - YouTube (2:33) and Concrete Jungle (Live at The Old Grey Whistle, 1973) - YouTube (4:11), little is left in doubt about the history that spawned such angry indignation in the provocative lyrics, Slave Driver (1973) - Bob Marley & The Wailers – YouTube (2:54).

Every time I hear the crack of
a whip
my blood runs cold
I remember on the slave ship
how they brutalize our very
souls
Today they say that we are free
only to be chained here
in poverty….

Macdonald, the Scottish-born director who is also the grandson of legendary Hungarian-British director Emeric Pressburger, tells the story of Marley’s life using different people he had met and worked with along the way, including interviews with Marley himself, much of it subtitled to help decipher the thick Jamaican patois, though the film never really captures the essence of his personality or his mischievous sense of humor, instead there’s a constant stream of music playing throughout, exposing the journey from his young life with his family, how his parents met, to his teenage origins in the music industry, his romance with Rita Marley, who described him as extremely shy, to his Rastafarian connections with spiritual advisor Mortimer Planno and the influence of Haile Salassie, who was mobbed by an adoring crowd on a 1966 visit to the island, much like Marley was after his death in 1981 when his body was returned to Jamaica.  No longer seeing himself as half-white and half-black, suffering the rejection of the people around him who viewed him as an outcast, he was simply embraced and accepted into the Rastafarian community, until he eventually became a major star, told with a sense of calm and restraint, where the man and his music are the message, with no political overkill.  But his progression included Jamaican hits like THE WAILERS - Bend Down Low [1966] - YouTube (2:32) which were extremely popular on the island, played constantly in dance halls, but never on radio stations that routinely rejected Rasta music.  The back story is told by his tour manager, Jamaican soccer legend Allan “Skill” Cole (both sharing a common love for football), where the group was forced to bring physically imposing gangsters with them carrying baseball bats into the radio studio, literally intimidating them to play his music, which initially led them to renowned record producer Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, with Bunny Wailer breaking out into song to describe the elation, Marley #1 Movie CLIP - Bob Marley (2012) HD - YouTube (2:28).  Eventually they found an innovative new producer in Lee “Scratch” Perry, something of an eccentric who used to work for Coxsone before starting up an independent business, but his energy and excitement in a music studio was infectious, eagerly dancing to what he heard, jumping on the tables, flailing his arms around in approval, where his early recordings of the Wailers had a profound influence on Marley’s career, as he was not afraid of experimentation, adding a spiritual element to his music, with the drum and the bass, viewed as the heartbeat and backbone, coming from two brothers, Carlton and Aston “Family Man” Barrett, providing the rhythmic foundation with a mix of funk, rhythm & blues, and soul, expressed in a jazzy way, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh & Bunny Wailer - Stir It Up (Live) 1973, YouTube (3:53).

One of the most profoundly affecting moments in the film comes from Constance Marley, a black half-sister accidentally discovered by Rita Marley, who also had a non-existent relationship with their same father, yet her reaction to hearing the same song played for the “white Marleys,” as she calls them, is much more impactful and emotional, completely identifying with how he must have felt being rejected by his father, placing a dramatic emphasis on how Bob Marley has finally assumed his rightful place in the family that excluded him, becoming the most significant Marley, replacing those others who have retreated into the background.  According to Judy Mowatt, she believes that rejection transformed him into the man he became, which is why he is so relatable and so easily identifiable to the rest of the world, as many people are rejected and hurting in similar ways, where his message of change and transformation is what defines his musical legacy.  With the camera gliding just above the Blue Mountains of eastern Jamaica, we hear the sounds of such an earthy and gospel-style rendition of perhaps his most famous ballad, a love-lullaby reminiscing about life in the “government yards” (housing projects) of Kingston, which just sends chills right through you to hear it, Bob Marley No Woman No Cry featuring Peter Tosh on piano (Marley Movie 2012) YouTube (1:44).   

No woman, no cry
No woman, no cry

‘Cause I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown
Observing the hypocrites
Mingle with the good people we meet
Good friends we have, oh, good friends we’ve lost
Along the way,
In this great future, you can’t forget your past
So dry your tears, I say

Everything’s gonna be alright
Everything’s gonna be alright…

Marley’s early success allowed him to buy his rehearsal studio and giant complex known as the Island House from Chris Blackwell, renamed the Tuff Gong Studios, current residence of The Bob Marley Museum | Tour Bob Marleys Life of Music in ..., and while Rastas weren’t allowed to move uptown in the prestigious wealthy district, there were no dreadlocks there up until then, as this is the same neighborhood as the governor and prime minister who lived just a few doors down, with Marley proclaiming “I bring the ghetto uptown,” Marley - 'Clip 4' - YouTube (1:56).  The film adequately covers the same deeply divided period plunging headfirst into civil war during the mid-70’s accentuated in Bob Marley: One Love (2024), including the assassination attempt, his exile in England, Marley Movie CLIP #2 (2012) Bob Marley Movie HD - YouTube (2:38), and the bookend peace concerts that attempted to heal the political divisions, though it adds the perspective of Diane Jobson, his female lawyer, who wryly comments, “What more do Jamaicans love than a man who’s just survived a gunfight?,” yet Marley’s dealings with Kingston gangs, Rastafarians, prime minister candidates, and African causes reveal a musician transcending the studio and stage, MARLEY Exclusive Clip - YouTube (2:18).  He was always perplexed that American blacks never fully embraced his music, as his concerts were mostly filled by white audiences, as that’s how he was marketed early on by Chris Blackwell (the cause of the breakup of the original Wailers), though by the end of his life his music gained an enduring power and global reach.  His death from cancer is given even greater scrutiny here, finding himself with few options, cutting his American tour short due to his failing health, yet somehow he was able to power through each concert, offering the full display of his showmanship despite flagging morale all around him.  Chemotherapy treatment caused him to lose his hair, but the cancer progressed throughout his body, given just weeks to live, so he stopped all medical treatment and instead sought holistic treatment from Dr. Josef Issels in the frigid wintry conditions of the snow-capped Bavarian forests of Rottach-Egern, Germany, where they even found Waltraud Ullrich, a nurse that treated him at the facility, who remembered his kindness and endless patience.   Perhaps the most haunting memory comes along a winding road as we hear his voice echoing through an empty forest covered in layers of snow, sounding like Bob Dylan accompanying himself on acoustic guitar in the 60’s, with Marley singing a song of freedom in his Redemption Song, Bob Marley - Redemption Song (Acoustic Version) YouTube (3:10), expressing the need for emancipation, yet it thoroughly embodies the spirit of the Rastas.

Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
from the bottomless pit
But my hand was made strong
by the hand of the Almighty.                                                                                        We forward in this generation                                                                                     Triumphantly.

Won’t you help to sing                                                                                               These songs of freedom?                                                                                          ‘Cause all I ever have                                                                                               Redemption songs                                                                                           Redemption songs.