'Round Midnight

 

Director Bertrand Tavernier with actor Philippe Noiret

Tavernier with Martin Scorsese

Dexter Gordon

 

 

 

‘ROUND MIDNIGHT             B+                                                                                          USA  France  (133 mi)  1986 ‘Scope  d: Bertrand Tavernier

The swing bands used to be all straight tonics seventh chords.  And then, with the Basie band I heard Lester Young and he sounded like he came out of the blue.  Because he was playing all the color tones the sixths and the ninths and major sevenths.  You know, like Debussy and Ravel.  Then Charlie Parker came on and he began to expand and he went into elevenths and thirteenths and flat fives.  Luckily, I was going in the same direction already.  You just don’t go out and pick a style off a tree one day.  The tree is inside you growing naturally.                       —Dale Turner (Dexter Gordon)

When you have to explore every night, even the most beautiful things that you find can be the most painful.                                                                                                                                   —Ace (Bobby Hutcherson)

The first English-language film by Bertrand Tavernier, the maker of Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français) (2016), where this is adapted from Dance of the Infidels, a 1986 book by French author and graphic designer Francis Paudras, a moving jazz memoir and biography that covers the last 8 years in the turbulent life of jazz pianist Bud Powell, who was to the piano what Charlie Parker was to the saxophone, with Tavernier, along with co-writer David Rayfiel, creating a fictionalized story combining the lives of Powell and tenor saxophonist Lester Young into a single character, an expatriate black jazz musician living in Paris during the late 1950’s, embodied by legendary tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon in the lead role, who was himself among the first influential bebop musicians.  Gordon had experience as a stage actor, appearing in the Los Angeles production of the 1959 play The Connection, made into a film by Shirley Clarke in 1961, which was about a collection of heroin-addicted jazz musicians who sat around waiting for their drug dealer, their “connection,” creating a great deal of censorship controversy at the time, yet it’s a compelling snapshot of a subculture that Gordon was familiar with, where the dialogue of the characters is interspersed with jazz music, some of which was written by Gordon.  According to Tavernier, jazz taught him the freedom of storytelling through improvisation, while also informing him that when performing a composition they didn’t write, musicians demonstrate a deep respect while simultaneously infusing it with their own unique style and personal touch.  This duality of respect for tradition and personal expression informs Tavernier’s filmmaking philosophy, where it’s ironic that it took a foreign director to do justice to jazz, a quintessential American artform, described by Roger Ebert in his TV review as a film that “creeps inside you and stays there,” Siskel & Ebert - 'Round Midnight YouTube (3:41).  Working closely with the director to ensure the film would accurately portray the jazz life, Gordon creates a unique persona that we’re not used to seeing, as he knew how musicians spoke and carried themselves, spending more than a dozen years living and performing in Europe, finding Europe in the 1960’s a much easier place to live than America, saying that he experienced less racism and greater respect for jazz musicians.  Named after a Thelonious Monk composition, the film was ranked #2 in Roger Ebert’s top films of 1986, and #9 in Gene Siskel’s top films of 1986, premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 1986, with Gordon nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award, while the jazz music written by pianist Herbie Hancock, one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound, who also appears in the film as pianist and bandleader Eddie Wayne, won an Oscar for Best Original Score in 1987, using harmonies influenced by great French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, beautifully rendered here, Herbie Hancock - The Peacocks YouTube (7:15), with Hancock quoted as saying, “Jazz is being in the moment.”  Gordon gives an inspired performance as the aging, self-destructive saxophonist Dale Turner, looking for a fresh start in Paris, where he is surrounded by an all-star group of young virtuoso musicians, giving the live jazz performances an authentic look and sound, where the film is light on plot, becoming more of an impressionistic mood piece, much like an extended jazz composition, even making reference to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948), suggesting “The music is all that matters.  Nothing but the music.”

An interesting aspect of Francis Paudras is that he was himself an accomplished yet amateur jazz and classical pianist, befriending many of the great jazz pianists who played in Europe in the early 60’s, and it was there that Paudras found Powell, where he developed a profound friendship, becoming his caretaker and unofficial manager in Paris during the early 60’s when Powell suffered a mental and physical health crisis, moving him into his own Paris apartment as he was recovering from mental breakdowns, tuberculosis, and alcoholism.  It was during this period that he began filming Powell with a 16mm home movie camera, amassing a collection of home movies, interviews, and recordings that offer valuable insights into Powell’s life.  This intervention in his life provides the template for Tavernier’s film, where the line between reality and fiction is very thin, while his decision to cast a deliberately slowed down, world weary Dexter Gordon, who is tall and lanky at six feet five, and seems to exist on another plane than everyone else around him, was based on the director’s displeasure with actors playing roles of musicians when it was obvious they couldn’t hold the instruments correctly or play a note, where he was going for authenticity, casting mostly black musicians as actors because they were real-life musical giants, giving the film credibility it wouldn’t otherwise have.  Other films about jazz have been undercut by both an ignorance about the music and by an inability to construct a dramatic context, including directors as diverse as Martin Ritt in Paris Blues (1961), John Cassavetes in Too Late Blues (1961), Martin Scorsese in New York, New York (1977), and Francis Ford Coppola in THE COTTON CLUB (1984), films that typically express an indifference to jazz history.  Tavernier makes up for this by hiring musicians who are among the best in the business, including Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Bobby Hutcherson, John McLaughlin, Billy Higgins, Cedar Walton, and French bassist Pierre Michelot who played with Powell, as nearly all of the music is recorded live, and we’re usually allowed to listen to it without edited interruptions, elevating the music of jazz to a central character, while he also allowed Gordon and the other musicians in the cast to collaborate on their own dialogue, with Gordon using the nickname “Lady” for all his friends, male and female, as well as his instrument, a habit attributed to Lester Young.  Considered among the best jazz films ever created, maybe the best, though Jeanne Moreau’s screen presence with the evocative film noir score by Miles Davis in Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958) is worthy of mention, while the best book on the subject may be the impressionistic stream-of-conscience novel about jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz, in Coming Through Slaughter by Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist Michael Ondaatje, his first published novel in 1976.  This is much better known than Tavernier’s other films simply because it had an American producer (Irwin Winkler) and much wider distribution in the U.S. through Warner Brothers.  What’s interesting about the film is the community of American artists in Paris, where their off-handed humor, interest in cooking their own food (Bobby Hutcherson is always dressed in a silk bathrobe, hilariously never leaving his hotel room, as he’s completely obsessed with spending all of his time cooking soul food), and sociable camaraderie add a lighthearted touch of humanism that starkly contrasts with the vibrant energy of the late-night music scenes.  

When Powell moved to France, it was with his girlfriend Altevia “Buttercup” Edwards, who managed his finances and his medicine, with Tavernier similarly creating a part for Sandra Reaves-Phillips as Buttercup, a sassy blues singer who is seen in the hotel greeting Turner’s arrival before appearing in the small Parisian jazz nightclub named the Blue Note, where she keeps him locked in his room until showtime and prevents them from paying him in cash, while also making sure they refuse to serve him alcohol.  But that doesn’t stop him from seeking drinks elsewhere, which is where he initially meets penniless movie poster illustrator, single father, and jazz aficionado Francis Borier (François Cluzet), looking like a young Dustin Hoffman, seen faithfully squatting down in the basement windowsill outside the club to hear, even in the pouring rain, as he hasn’t the cover charge for admittance.  Turner asks him to buy him a beer across the street, and the two become fast friends.  We’ve seen François Cluzet before in the very first Claire Denis film, Chocolat (1988), and an earlier Olivier Assayas film, Late August, Early September (Fin août, début septembre)  (1998), where his enthusiasm for Turner’s music is genuine, inviting him back to his home where he meets his impressionable young pre-teen daughter Bérangère (Gabrielle Haker), currently living separately from her mother (Christine Pascal), who is in the midst of having an affair with another man.  Their friendship forms the basis of the film, as he helps prevent the police from sending him to a sanitarium following an arrest, and helps stabilize his life.  Even knowing how easily he gives in to temptation, as drugs and alcohol are the bane of his existence, Francis eliminates the influence of his money handlers and has the club pay him directly, while also helping him stay sober by allowing him to live in his home, returning to him a sense of empowerment.  Openly embracing a subtext of racism in America, telling a flashback story that was partly derived from Lester Young’s recollections of witnessing brutal beatings and racist abuse in the army, while also drawing upon other jazz artists who came before him, the mannerisms and quiet dignity that Dexter Gordon brings to bear are all his own, powerful enough, apparently, that none other than Marlon Brando wrote to him to say that it was the first time in fifteen years that he’d learned something new about acting.  This is beautifully captured in a sequence with Lonette McKee as former lover Darcey Leigh, who takes the stage to eloquently sing a song, How Long Has This Been Going On?  YouTube (4:05), where her white gardenias connect her to Billie Holiday and Lester Young.  He eventually decides it’s time to return back home to New York, see his old friends, and re-acquaint himself with his own estranged daughter, with Martin Scorsese making a cameo appearance as his motormouth agent, Goodley.  His daughter Chan (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) is invited to a club to hear her father dedicate a melancholic song for her, Dexter Gordon - Chan's song (from the movie) YouTube (3:09), which reflects the emotional distance that still remains between them, knowing he has not been there enough in her life.  Not long afterwards Francis receives word that Turner has died, with the final scene paying tribute to his musical legacy and influence, introduced by none other than Herbie Hancock at the Théâtre Antique de Lyon, 23 'Round Midnight · Ending Scene | Remember Dale Turner YouTube (3:46), while reels of Super 8 movies are watched by Francis and his daughter, becoming an elegy to his lasting memory.

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)