THE GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION
2024 Live Dual-Projection version, 16mm silent plus Digital Projection, 98 minutes.
2025, Single-Channel DCP, 98 minutes.
Supported by the Atelier 105 residency, Light Cone, Paris and a Yaddo artists residency, New York
In 1964, 30-year-old waitress and single mother named Gloria, was persuaded to engage in psychotherapy sessions on film, with three of the most influential Psychologists of the 20th century. Reeves newest dual-projection film breaks down and expands the 1965 educational film series “Three Approaches to Psychotherapy” with an intricate superimposed montage of scenes from Gloria’s unguarded sessions, with numerous film artifacts of her lifetime: newsreels, home movies, commercials, cold war propaganda, and educational films from the 1930s-1970s.
The compelling layered montage brings out the absurdity, anger, and profound revelations that arise from baring one’s secrets to the experts. Daughter of Polish immigrants, Gloria’s spiritual journey is both inspiring and heartrending. From Catholic school girl to teenage bride and psychotherapy patient, Gloria forges her own honest and principled self as a remarkably independent thinker and generous soul, whose life was cut terribly short.
Director's Statement
I craft my films as “cinematic encounters”; they exemplify my fluid process of making them, one driven by curiosity, observation and discovery. I edit during the same period I am shooting, researching, and writing the story. Multiple layers of meaning are contained within the finished works, which spark curiosity and conjure a direct emotional experience to expand the viewers’ perspectives. As I compose intricate montages, I aim for that delicate balance between sharing enough to kindle intellectual, visceral, and emotional engagement, without limiting or imposing what a person is supposed to “get”. It is my desire that an audience member will have a subjective experience all their own.
My oeuvre is varied: the style and shape of each film reflects the content and tenor of the work. My film projects often spring from an urge to dig in deep, to explore and better understand an experience or person who has affected me deeply. I then work to translate the personal towards something that affects us all: our culture, our world and our loved ones. The strategies and techniques I used for THE GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION are striking in their contrast (from fleeting and superimposed montage to archival interviews to painting directly on celluloid) but they also mimic the radically different psychotherapy techniques the three doctors in the film demonstrate in these authentic psychotherapy sessions with Gloria. I am forever compelled to make films that surprise me, films that emerge as quite singular in a cinematic form, giving expression to interpretations below the surface.
One motivating force behind making THE GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION was a desire to comprehend more acutely the personal challenges and contradictions of my mother’s generation, the lasting power of internalized “male supremacy”, and to develop greater empathy for her foibles and resentments. Gloria, born a few years earlier than my mother, grew up with the same traditional values “shoved down her throat”: how my mother referred to her sex-role indoctrination at home, church and school through the 1940s-1960. Reproductive rights, the right of self-determination, didn’t exist for women when both Gloria and my mother reached their childbearing years; very few fields of occupation were open to them and most paid low wages. These lessons were idealized and solidified by the seductive, glowing images on the silver screen though generations removed.
Jennifer Reeves, Writer, Director, Editor, September 2025