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Sundance 2024: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Nocturnes
Nocturnes, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s first feature, 1997’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, intertwined news footage of plane hijackings with voiceover readings of passages from Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II—he’s no stranger to rendering sweeping diagnoses within unorthodox historical frameworks. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat re-examines the assassination of Patrice Lumumba; the Soundtrack portion of the title points to the film’s other main strand, the political roles of American jazz musicians during the period, ranging from unwittingly complicit—Louis Armstrong performed a show in the Congo unaware that he was providing cover for CIA actions—to actively dissident, with the film bookended by vocalist Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach crashing the UN to protest Lumumba’s murder. A rich swath of different genres of jazz ties the film together, while its titles often mimic the blue and yellow tones of vintage Blue Note album covers.
Grimonprez says that eight years of research went into the film, a claim I see no reason to disbelieve. Drawing upon both English- and French-language sources, Coup shows its work in every title card, which cites the author name, article/book title and page number for each quote. There are freshly recorded voiceover readings from key texts and precisely one new interview, but otherwise the film is entirely constructed from a deep well of archival footage. The basic thesis is easy to grasp and hard to disagree with: the western powers are always lying when they say they’re not up to some kind of global meddling. While the CIA comes in for a drubbing, Grimonprez also places particular emphasis on the Belgian state, as in this clearly implausible denial from the late Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak: “Belgium is neither colonialist, nor neo-colonialist, nor imperialist.” The specificity is how you know he was lying about all three.
In truth, what Soundtrack requires is not an evaluation from a fussy formalist like me but detailed examinations from knowledgeable historian specialists of the period who can weigh in on the finer points. One of Grimonprez’s agendas is to argue that Nikita Khrushchev has been wronged historically, especially in the context of the UN, and that his initial failed attempt to pass a resolution against colonialism led to a second, successful passage of it by newly independent African states. Is that meaningfully true? Did Khrushchev act in good faith and, if he didn’t, does it really matter? When the motion passed, was that in any way effective? These questions are all well beyond my purview. I can attest that the film compresses a great deal into its 150 minutes, which fairly fly by. While the film’s primary agenda is bluntly didactic, and hence not entirely my thing, its politics are scrupulously detailed, righteous and surely on-schedule: American involvement in foreign affairs despite worldwide protest is obviously even more relevant this week than most. Footage of Malcolm X responding to a question about whether his positions weren’t from the “lunatic fringe” implicitly speaks on behalf of the film as well: “America’s whole situation is a lunatic fringe.”
The last decade has seen a rise in production of, and broader worldwide festival interest in, Indian nonfiction, reflected at Sundance over the last three years by one slot in the world documentary section reserved for the specific sub-category of art-leaning Indian movies related to climate change. 2022 had Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (birds), last year brought Against the Tide (fishing) and now there’s Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes, following scientists in the East Himalayas on a mission to count and observe hawk moths. Screens are erected in the forest for the few nights when those surfaces can compete in brightness with the moon. When the moths fly onto the surfaces, the scientists photograph them and later analyze the photos for further information—for example, the insect’s dimensions, which can only be measured if there’s no shadow underneath their body. A shadow indicates that their wings aren’t precisely flush with the surface, and hence any dimensions measured against the screen’s grid would be false.
This little quirk is pretty much the only piece of factual information I retained from Nocturnes, probably because it relates to things I have a pre-existing interest in (visual perspective, the pedantry required to complete complex tasks successfully). But facts aren’t supposed to be this film’s primary mission—the press kit leans repeatedly on the word “immersive,” probably in an attempt to preemptively ward off any complaints that it’s low on story. “Immersive,” of course, doesn’t have to mean the aggressive tactics of exemplary Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab projects like Leviathan, whose aesthetic wouldn’t fit an observational work about nighttime observation in any case. Sonically, Nocturnes offers immersion via Dolby Atmos, conspicuously deployed in an opening flutter of wings which race all around the theater before being scaled back for subtler surround-sound world construction. Visually, Nocturnes is a testament to how good digital cameras can be at night, as in a shot from high up a mountain looking down at a moth screen, its metaphorically suggestive resemblance to a glowing movie screen unmissable in the darkness, or the cathode-ray flickering of monsoon lightning at night.
Such sporadic images aside, Nocturnes is compositionally and texturally flat. I was impressed by the rendering of the forest twilight, nicely shaded in grays, an unfamiliar sight from a landscape I hadn’t seen before. But that muted charcoal quality also applies to the moths, whose patterns never add up to kaleidescopic frenzy or anything else striking. The scientists are all certainly lovely and dedicated, but as captured here are essentially soporific; I would be hard-pressed to remember a single thing they said or a meaningful personal detail aside from some generic chatter about their children, and certainly didn’t pick up on the fact that main scientist Mansi is working alongside a young man, Nicki who, the press kit says, “is from the indigenous Bugun community”—presumably a relationship whose power dynamics are worth exploring, or at least it sure seems like a missed opportunity to not do so. The final scene moves from generalized research to the applied science portion as Mansi lectures a room about her findings and their predictably potentially catastrophic implications for climate change. As a global warming apocalypticist, I support the animating impulse at work for both filmmakers and scientists, but, though I can’t speak to the caliber of the latter’s work, I can’t say this concluding call-to-action made Nocturnes any more retroactively artful or effective.
