This article appeared in the February 14, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Gloria of Your Imagination (Jennifer Reeves, 2024). Image courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Jennifer Reeves has long explored the intersections of women’s autonomy, psychology, and the cultural forces that shape them. From Chronic (1996), which dives into the chaotic inner world of a teenager in and out of a mental hospital, to The Time We Killed (2004), a haunting reflection on an agoraphobic Brooklynite’s isolation in the wake of 9/11, Reeves has used cinema as a means of interrogating the psychological terrain of her characters. Her new film, The Gloria of Your Imagination, is a striking outlier in her oeuvre, combining avant-garde direct-on-film techniques, nonfiction footage, and live-performance elements in an unconventional dual-projection format.

The film revisits and deconstructs the 1965 educational film Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, which filmed 30-year-old waitress and single mother Gloria Szymanski during three different therapy sessions with three leading experts in their respective fields of practice. Framed as a clinical study, the project subjected Gloria to public scrutiny she neither anticipated nor consented to (she was told the film was for therapist training, but later found it sold to public television). Reeves reexamines the footage, defying conventional documentary techniques by hand-painting 16mm film with vibrant ink blots and saturated colors, undermining the ever-prevalent cultural hegemony of commercial, normative image-making practices, while also incorporating mid-century industrial films and home movies to create a tactile cinematic experience grounded in a rich historical and political context. These altered and disparate materials expand Gloria’s story and embed it within a broader societal critique of women’s exploitation and objectification in media, patriarchal structures in therapy, and the outdated ideologies that continue to permeate contemporary culture.

At the October 2024 New York premiere of The Gloria of Your Imagination at Cinema Village, I was struck by the film’s near-seamless blend of intimate storytelling and aesthetic sophistication. Eager to learn more, I sat down with Reeves at her studio a few weeks later. We discussed how the film was not only a labor of love but also the product of deep intellectual curiosity, formal rigor, and, of course, considerable polish.

How did you first hear about or get introduced to Gloria Szymanski?

I have an in-progress film that I started quite some years ago. It’s historical, centered on a Cuban revolutionary named Celia Sánchez. I was on eBay looking for 16mm prints for that film and often put “women” in the search bar because imagery and meaningful content of women is very hard to find in historical footage. [Three Approaches to Psychotherapy] just came up in one of my searches, and I’ve had an interest in therapy, mental health, and recovery for years. When I saw the title and the price was right, I had to grab it. Before that, I didn’t know anything about the films or Gloria.

When did you first watch the film and decide to use it for your own work?

I sometimes host home screenings where I’ll get the projectors out in the back of my home, and I started something called Projection Roulette: guests pick a few reels at random, I do the double-projection thing and mix the soundtracks. Really interesting results come up this way—the way humans think, they’ll put things together, whether it’s a kind of counterpoint that becomes funny or the material lines up to create new meanings [in disparate images]. I used Three Approaches footage at one of those events, and it was a great time. I thought to myself, “I gotta do something with this someday.”

In 2019, Ed [Halter] and Thomas [Beard] from Light Industry asked me if I had anything new to screen there, and I said I did—even though it was only in my mind at that point. I spent three months building the multiple-projection montage, adding other footage from the time period, and did a three-projector performance at Light Industry, mixing the sound from the three reels. It was the seedling for The Gloria of Your Imagination, but when the pandemic hit, I stopped working on it. About two years ago, I picked it up again, started doing research, and began exploring it more as a serious piece. I really dove in. I became so enthralled with Gloria and all the implications that came with her story.

How long would you say the research and making of The Gloria of Your Imagination took you altogether?

I worked on it for about two and a half years in total. It’s hard to gauge because I always edit at the same time that I’m researching and writing, and I had to do a lot of sound and image restoration as well. The film went through many iterations. Crafting transitions and finding balance between Gloria’s sessions and story to montages of different archival and original footage was very challenging. These montages are meant to inform the viewer’s awareness of the time, culturally or educationally, and how things were depicted back then. It was essential to connect Gloria inside the therapy office to the world outside, but making it work took much more time than I wanted. I’m up to 44 different versions of it now—it really was such a colossal undertaking.

The film presents a lot of information, yet it never feels overly didactic. 

I initially wanted to treat the therapists equally, almost like a journalist. I tried to keep it objective, but I became less objective and more attuned to nuance the longer I worked on it. I made choices in terms of moments I selected from the sessions, but I tried not to impose my views too much. Sessions tend to get repetitive, as you’re going over the same points, but I wanted it to feel real too, so I also included longer excerpts. You can’t keep every last thing you want, or you lose viewer engagement. My first rough cut was 108 minutes, filled with key exchanges between Gloria and the therapists, but I knew it was too much.

You mentioned during the screening I attended that you originally wanted to use dual 16mm projectors, but that the sound quality wouldn’t be good enough due to the high amount of dialogue. For those unfamiliar with 16mm sound mechanics, could you explain why?

16mm sound is mono and lacks the dynamic and frequency range of digital soundtracks. 16mm sound used to play better because 16mm projectors were in better shape and sound systems in more venues were configured to exhibit analog film. These days, the poor quality of 16mm sound would interfere with the audience understanding what Gloria and the therapists say, and that’s not acceptable to me. The last 16mm film of mine that had a lot of dialogue was The Time We Killed (2004), and even then I had so many problems with the sound quality. I haven’t finished any films with a major vocal element to 16mm since. For this film, all the imagery with sync-sound is digital projection, and the 16mm that I project is silent. That way, I never have to worry about it again.

This is easily your most ambitious work yet, after several decades as a working artist. Was it fulfilling to complete such a major undertaking?

For years, I alternated between shorts and longer pieces. Shorts have a satisfying amount of time between starting and finishing, and they bring the pleasure of completion. It’s easier to “perfect” a short to a level where I feel comfortable—but my work doesn’t feel fully gratifying unless I’m challenging myself. After I made When It Was Blue (2008), I only finished short films until now, and none of it felt as rewarding as this full-length dual projection film.

In the end, I feel good about Gloria. I questioned so often whether I would regret how much time I spent on it. One way I relate to Gloria is in that nagging feeling that I’m not spending enough time with my kids. If this project didn’t work out, the biggest pain would have been thinking about that lost time. I work very long hours. Most parents, but more traditionally women, experience that conflict. There’s a phrase in psychology called the “good-enough mother,” which suggests you don’t have to be perfect—you just need to be good enough to make sure your children feel valued, but not so “perfect” that you cause serious damage. [Laughs.] With that in mind, I’ve definitely been a good-enough mother.

Paul Attard is a New York–based life-form whose writing on experimental cinema has also appeared in MUBI Notebook and Screen Slate.