So say I make a controller for a main menu 'page', would MainMenu be composed of the individual view elements like labels and buttons directly or would it reference a class such as MainMenuView which had those elements instead? Or would it just send events to an event system to communicate with the view? Or something else?
The buttons and labels would most likely be in the View, although labels can come from the Controller. Normally a View is just the html scaffolding, and the data that the View contains is populated from the Model by the Controller. So for a main menu, it's probably going to just be links and labels to other sections so there probably won't be a Model for it, the Controller will just return the View.
So if someone went to SomeMVCSite.com/home/index, the Index Action would be called in the Home Controller. The Home Controller would retrieve data from the database based on a Model and return the View + the data.