Island filmmaker Victoria Campbell will fulfill a longtime dream of hers this month when a series of films that she curated will be featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on Feb. 16 and 17. Among the short films is one that she made in 2011, called “In Betweens.”
The series is titled “New York City Symphonies of the Millennium Film Workshop,” and each two- to 18-minute film focuses on an aspect of life in the city. All of the filmmakers have a connection with the Millennium Film Workshop, a six-decade-old NYC-based organization that has been educating and facilitating filmmaking since the 1960s.
The MoMA website describes the series in the following way: “Over the past few decades, the filmmakers of Millennium Film Workshop have produced a wide range of films devoted to New York. These films can be understood as a continuation of the venerable ‘city symphony’ genre, and a modernization of the genre through new technology, interpretation, and techniques. This series aims to invoke the spirit of the early City Symphonies, and apply it to the New York of the late 20th century and the early part of this century.”
City Symphonies is a term used to describe a particular genre of silent films made primarily in the 1920s, which feature footage filmed around various locations in one particular city to evoke the general gestalt of the place.
“We wanted to bring forth a feeling of the city through all different eyes and eras,” says Campbell, a Millennium board member who was joined by fellow board member Joe Wakeman in curating the series.
The films, all experimental in nature, vary widely in subject and style. One features nothing but views of the Statue of Liberty, with a soundtrack of voices, speaking in many languages, recorded on the ferry. Another is set in a crumbling, soon to be demolished Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1970s. Campbell’s film includes shots of the former Millennium space on East 4th Street right before the organization was forced out due to escalating rents and an inability to keep up with repairs. In an effort to make the series more inclusive, Campbell also selected a futuristic, dystopian film set in the South Bronx that was shot in 2019 by high school students and young filmmakers who were students of hers. The range of topics and eras gives an up-close and personal snapshot of New York through the decades.
The series was originally scheduled to screen at the Bronx Documentary Center in the spring of 2020, before COVID canceled all public events. The MoMA, which had recently acquired a large collection of films and footage from the Millennium archives, stepped in to host the series.
Although they no longer have a physical home, the Millennium Film Workshop organization continues to hold classes, publish the longstanding Millennium Film Journal and, according to its website, “foster experimentation and artistic development in film and video, steadfast in its mission to highlight new and unknown visions from beyond the commercial world of film.”
Campbell has been involved with Millennium since 2011. She has taken and taught classes, and screened her films at the former East Village space. The Island-born and -raised filmmaker moved to New York City to pursue an acting career before switching her focus and earning an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Campbell’s films have screened at multiple film festivals, and won a variety of awards.
During COVID, Campbell moved back to the Vineyard to raise her child and teach English at the West Tisbury School. A first cut of her film “Dimka,” about an eccentric Russian man she befriended while living in the Bronx, was screened at the M.V. Film Center last year. She continues to work on the editing of that film, and plans to eventually pursue other projects, while continuing her work with Millennium.
Campbell says she is thrilled to have an opportunity to introduce these films to a wider audience, help raise awareness of the historically important organization, and to provide a picture of New York City throughout the mid-20th and early 21st century.
In the page for the series on the MoMA website, Campbell and Wakeman provided the following description: “Perhaps when these short films are viewed together, the viewer will gain a deeper understanding of the city, its inner workings, its organic growth, and the profound changes that it has undergone in its recent history.”
Millennium Film Workshop’s “New York City Symphonies” series, curated by Victoria Campbell and Joe Wakeman, will screen at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan on Feb. 16 and 17. The series is divided into two parts — Daytime and Nighttime. For more information, visit moma.org/calendar/film/5433.