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Sixty years ago, a 30-year-old waitress and single mother, was persuaded to engage in psychotherapy sessions on film, with three of the most influential Theorist-Psychologists of the 20th century. Reeves newest dual-projection film breaks down and expands the seminal film series Three Approaches to Psychotherapy with an intricate superimposed montage consisting of material from Gloria’s unguarded sessions and numerous film artifacts of her lifetime: newsreels, home movies, commercials, a beauty pageant, cold war propaganda, and educational films from the 1930s-1970s.
The Gloria of your Imagination immerses audience members in an unabashed patriarchal, nationalistic era which many U.S. conservatives are working tirelessly to recreate. Social and legal limitations of that era, which formed Gloria and the struggles of her generation, remain unacknowledged in the sessions. While the therapists seem progressively non-judgmental about Gloria’s active sex life, there is no mention that contraceptives are actually illegal for her to take. Reeves’ original intertitle script fills in missing context and introduces Gloria’s greater life and self: from her Polish-Catholic upbringing to marriage straight from high school to an ever-evolving single parent on a spiritual journey, living by her own principles, until an untimely death at 46 years of age.
By projecting films that Gloria could have seen in their original 16mm format, on top of portions from Gloria’s psychotherapy sessions, viewers absorb the culture of that era directly. Original 16mm shot by Reeves, and footage doctored with her signature direct-on-film techniques, bring about viewers’ subjective experiences and visceral connections to Gloria’s inner experience. The “three Glorias” put on display by therapists with vastly divergent methods and conclusions, are displaced by the Glorias viewers experience, and perhaps by the courageous and determined individual imagined by the filmmaker.
The Gloria of your Imagination (Jennifer T Reeves | United States | 2024 | 97 min) (only in theaters)