“I’m really moved by landscape–by the changing of the light as it comes into contact with earth and rocks,” says Victorina Z. Peterson, who shot ten experimental 16-millimeter films on the coast of Maine during the 1970s and early ’80s. “I wanted to find a vocabulary that matched that kind of energy.”
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In those days she was part of New York City’s thriving experimental film community, which revolved around Jonas Mekas’s Film-Maker’s Cooperative. A founding editor of the Millennium Film Journal, Peterson, who then called herself Vicki Z., was a one-woman operation, shooting and editing and arranging regular screenings of her films. “I would finish a 100-foot roll–[three minutes] of footage,” she says. “Then I’d send it to the lab in New Jersey and wait at least two weeks for it to come back so I could look at it. Sometimes I’d have to wait a month…to finish a sequence I really liked. Sometimes I’d have to wait years.”
She was on sabbatical with her husband in Washington, D.C., two years ago when she mentioned her films to a colleague’s son. Josh Goldberg was finishing up a PhD in media at NYU, knew digital editing, and wanted to see her work. “I didn’t even know where to start,” she recalls. “I hadn’t opened a can in over 15 years. It was sitting in my closet. I thought that part of my life was gone.”
