SF Cinematheque Presents: Jennifer Reeves: The Gloria of Your Imagination
Thu, Jan 15
|Gray Area Theater
Filmmaker Jennifer Reeves presents The Gloria of Your Imagination, an experimental documentary that revisits a 1960s psychotherapy case study to probe gender, psychology, and cultural history.
Time & Location
Jan 15, 2026, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Gray Area Theater, 2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
About the event
Cinematheque rings in the new year welcoming filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, in person to present The Gloria of Your Imagination, an evocatively edited double-projected 16mm/digital mash-up exploring sexuality, gendered power relationships and motherhood in the context of the burgeoning field of psychotherapy in 1960s America. The Gloria of Your Imagination: In 1964, 30-year-old waitress and single mother Gloria Szymanski agreed to engage in psychotherapy sessions on film with three of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, each a leader in a competing therapeutic school—Carl Rogers (Client Centered Therapy), Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy) and Albert Ellis (Rational-Emotive Therapy).
These filmed sessions were released to the public in 1965 (under dubious ethical circumstances) as Three Approaches to Psychotherapy (dir. Everett L. Shostrom). In Gloria…, Reeves distills and expands this 1960s educational film with a superimposed montage. Excerpts from Gloria’s unguarded sessions are woven into other film artifacts from her lifetime. Newsreel…