Judy speaks
Grégoire Aubert
From 1963 to 1966 Judy Garland recorded tapes in order to write her autobiography. The project failed, certainly because as she said it herself: “When you’ve lived the life I’ve lived, when you’ve loved and suffered and been madly happy and desperately sad, that’s when you realize you’ll never be able to set it all down… Maybe you’d rather die, first…”
However, the tapes remain, and they are raw documents like the few left by Hollywood, recorded while Judy was in England, alone, certainly very late at night or early in the morning, probably under the influence of drugs and alcohol, she decided to talk and she was determined to put the record straight and attack those who humiliated her and used her; husbands, gossip-mongers, public, producers, press agents. On another hand, she evokes her beautiful children, defines a very modern way of upbringing, talks about love, tells funny story about herself with her own inimitable self-deprecating sense of humour…
Why bring those words to an audience when you could listen to them very easily in their original version? I think it’s simply because they are re-inactivated by being embodied. I have been fascinated by Garland for more than five years now, and there are so many gems undiscovered that I want to share with today’s audience, because to me, Judy Garland is not just an amazing entertainer, she’s a woman who was extremely intelligent, witty and self-conscious of her fate… The fact that she is a Gay Icon, does not interest me much. The reason why gays connect with her is far more important to me. If I had to sum it up, it’s in the way she faced humiliation and tragedy but eventually stood up against it, her philosophy of life: live, laugh love, her way of laughing at herself and aspiring to an “Over The Rainbow”…
Grégoire Aubert
From 1963 to 1966 Judy Garland recorded tapes in order to write her autobiography. The project failed, certainly because as she said it herself: “When you’ve lived the life I’ve lived, when you’ve loved and suffered and been madly happy and desperately sad, that’s when you realize you’ll never be able to set it all down… Maybe you’d rather die, first…”
However, the tapes remain, and they are raw documents like the few left by Hollywood, recorded while Judy was in England, alone, certainly very late at night or early in the morning, probably under the influence of drugs and alcohol, she decided to talk and she was determined to put the record straight and attack those who humiliated her and used her; husbands, gossip-mongers, public, producers, press agents. On another hand, she evokes her beautiful children, defines a very modern way of upbringing, talks about love, tells funny story about herself with her own inimitable self-deprecating sense of humour…
Why bring those words to an audience when you could listen to them very easily in their original version? I think it’s simply because they are re-inactivated by being embodied. I have been fascinated by Garland for more than five years now, and there are so many gems undiscovered that I want to share with today’s audience, because to me, Judy Garland is not just an amazing entertainer, she’s a woman who was extremely intelligent, witty and self-conscious of her fate… The fact that she is a Gay Icon, does not interest me much. The reason why gays connect with her is far more important to me. If I had to sum it up, it’s in the way she faced humiliation and tragedy but eventually stood up against it, her philosophy of life: live, laugh love, her way of laughing at herself and aspiring to an “Over The Rainbow”…