The Gloria of your Imagination, the new experimental feature from Jennifer Reeves, arrives at a moment when the future of women’s autonomy is an open question. With a firm understanding that past is prologue, Reeves excavates a documentary from 1965 that concerns a woman’s subjective freedom — freedom to control her own image, to establish herself as an individual subject, to define motherhood according to her own code of ethics, and to define herself as a sexual being. What makes this film, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, such a remarkable document is the fact that its “protagonist,” a woman named Gloria Szymanski, has willingly agreed to be part of a therapeutic experiment, one that stages highly artificial sequences under the auspice of helping her, even though she is the one providing a service to the field of psychiatry. For her contribution, she was paid back with public embarrassment, but also with a personal mentorship that helped nurture her through the remainder of her brief life. (Szymanski died at age 45 from leukemia.)
Three Approaches to Psychotherapy was a project that was spearheaded by Gloria’s own therapist, Everett Shostrom, who suggested her participation. In the film, we observe single sessions between Gloria and three different therapists, each a leader in a competing therapeutic school: Carl Rogers’ Client-Centered therapy; Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy, and Albert Ellis’s Rational-Emotive therapy. Reeves’ film re-presents much of Three Approaches, showing us portions of all three of Gloria’s encounters, along with examples of the women’s culture that would have surrounded Gloria in 1965 (TV ads, media representations of proper femininity), along with home movies, not of Gloria but from the life of a girl who would’ve been about Gloria’s age. In this way, The Gloria of your Imagination takes documentation of a very specific, very odd event and broadens its context. If we understand the therapeutic situation to be one that artificially closes out the larger world, asking the analysand to focus inward, Reeves’ intervention forcefully brings Gloria’s world back in, both contextualizing and implicitly critiquing the highly formal interaction between Gloria and the therapists.
But even the film itself requires a broader context, in order to understand its impact on Gloria’s life. She repeatedly claimed that Shostrom secured her participation by assuring her that this would be a training film for therapists and, as such, would be screened only under private, academic conditions. Instead, Shostrom sold the film to public television, and it received numerous international screenings. (You can find Three Approaches on YouTube as we speak.) Gloria took legal action against Shostrom but was unsuccessful. So, in a sense, The Gloria of your Imagination is not just a consideration of Gloria as a young woman undergoing psychotherapy in the mid-’60s but an attempt by Reeves to support Gloria’s case for having been violated by subjecting the film itself to close analysis and, in a sense, relitigating her cause. The therapeutic situation is all about creating a coherent picture of oneself through language, struggling to achieve greater accuracy and authenticity. But Gloria’s good-faith attempts to do this were turned into a second-order representation, making her into an external figure over whom she had no control.
In The Gloria of your Imagination, Reeves engages in cinematic creation as a kind of reading process, making meaning not by generating new image sets but by taking earlier representations and subjecting them to rigorous analysis. This is a practice we are seeing in a lot of experimental documentaries of the moment, in works by Tiffany Sia, Courtney Stephens, Travis Wilkerson, and others. Rather than trying to produce images of our contemporary world, images that cannot command as much trust as those produced in earlier eras, these artists examine the continuing hold that historical representations have on our imaginations and ideologies. This found footage becomes the subject itself, and while the material is, of course, as susceptible to skepticism as any other representation, it avoids complete distrust by limiting its claims to reality. In this scenario, signs are perhaps more substantial than the material reality they reflect, precisely because they openly engage with the problem of mediation.
Reeves has made a major new contribution to this project of historical-materialist cinema. Over the course of her career, she has consistently examined women’s subjectivity and the social and political forces that impinge upon it. Her semi-autobiographical featurette Chronic (1997) also considered psychiatry, from the position of Gretchen (Noel Kalom), a young woman in a mental hospital. In that film, Reeves combined fictionalized, dramatic material with found footage and documentary images that provide a sense of the cultural landscape that helped form Gretchen and to which her depression and self-harm are a comprehensible response. The filmmaker’s 2004 feature film The Time We Killed also examines the situation of a woman whose psychological state places her at odds with the larger world. Robyn (Lisa Jarnot) is an agoraphobe who finds herself unable to leave her New York apartment in the aftermath of 9/11. Traumatized not only by the event but by the subsequent Iraq War, she interfaces with the outside world only through television, which does not so much mitigate the world’s violence as transmute it into something else.
With The Gloria of your Imagination, Reeves once again engages psychiatry, in discourse and in practice, as imbricated with larger structures of ableism and misogyny. In the film, we hear Gloria explicitly take issue with Perls, a bearded and bespectacled German whose approach to therapy she sees as patronizing and aggressive. Although it may be unfair to hold Perls’ age and demeanor against him, he so exemplifies the Freudian stereotype of the overbearing psychiatrist that he serves as a metonym for the practice as a whole. Then again, how unfair is this assessment, when Gloria herself is constructed as being an exemplary analysand, her pain and confusion treated as a control group for the comparison of rival therapeutic approaches? The turning point of Reeves’ film comes when, during her very positive session with Rogers, she tells him that he is the kind of man she wished her father had been. “I think you’d make a good daughter,” he replies, offering her validation that, in some ways, was all she really needed. (Gloria remained friends with Carl and Helen Rogers for the rest of her life.)
“This is something more than just transference and counter-transference,” Rogers tells the camera, making himself vulnerable in ways the other two therapists could not. Reeves shows how this minor transgression against official protocol expanded Gloria’s therapeutic experience, allowing human fallibility, the uncontrolled element, to enter the cloistered space of the analyst’s office. Once again, Reeves demonstrates how the scientific desire to close spaces off from the messy world is both impossible and, to a large extent, undesirable, and regardless of the therapists’ intentions, cannot be easily disentangled from the historical drive to keep women under lock and key.
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