When Karen Kramer last talked to The New York Times about her film "The Ballad of Greenwich Village," she said she felt pressed for money and time. Especially time. She had been working on her opus about Village history and lore for six years and was worried that much of what she wanted to record was going to disappear before she could memorialize it on film.
That was in 1999.
Now, a dozen years after she began, her labor of love (and persistence and not a little frustration) will open on Friday, at the Quad Cinema, located - where else? - in the Village, on 13th Street.
She wasn't able to interview everyone she said she had hoped to. Many significant Villagers died before she got to them, including the activist lawyer William M. Kunstler; Bella Abzug, the feminist politician; and Lucille Lortel, the grande dame of downtown theater. A major figure, Allen Ginsberg, agreed to participate but died before Ms. Kramer was able to film him. Bob Dylan is alive but wasn't willing.
On the other hand, her film includes interviews with many illustrious old-timers - Woody Allen, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer - who provide evocative memories and wry commentary.
Ms. Kramer also spoke to the not-famous, covering a range of traditionally nontraditional Village types: protestors, transvestites, gays and artists. She didn't bother with the upscale newcomers who often pay rents geared more to investment bankers than to bohemians. While the film's tone is gentle, Ms. Kramer doesn't suppress her irritation with landlords in general and, in particular, with New York University, a major Village property owner.
Mr. Mailer, interviewed in his old hangout, the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, remarks on the contrast between the area's former counterculture days and its current real estate prices. "One of the ironies," he says, "is that, unless you live pretty high up in that bourgeois world, you can't afford an apartment here in the Village."
On a recent steamy day, Ms. Kramer sat at an outside table at Caffe Dante on Macdougal Street, sipping hot chocolate. Dressed in black and wearing several bangles on her wrist, she seemed a little wistful as she talked about her odyssey making the film. She had chosen this appropriately quaint location after some thought. "I am often at a loss these days to find the quintessential Greenwich Village spot," she said.
She said she didn't expect that making a movie about her neighborhood - she has lived in the Village for 30 years - would be so difficult. "I really thought it was going to be my easiest film, and it turned out to be the most difficult," she said. The project cost about $125,000, in addition to many donations, which included film stock, archival music and images, and labor.
A teacher of film at the New School since 1987, Ms. Kramer has been producing and directing documentaries for almost as long as she has lived in the Village. She is a kind of anthropologist, specializing in films about the rituals and myths of cultures and people that even longtime Villagers might find exotic: practitioners of Haitian voodoo, Moko Jumbies (stilt walkers from the Caribbean and West African), a Pentecostal sect whose religious rites involve handling rattlesnakes.
The film about rattlesnakes, "The Jolo Serpent Handlers" (completed in 1977), was her first. She had been invited by a former classmate, then teaching in an impoverished school in West Virginia, to show his students some experimental films. While there, she learned of churches whose rites involved snakes and visited them with her camera. She decided to make a full-length documentary. In less than two years, she raised money, returned to West Virginia three times with a camera crew and edited the film, which was shown on public television and at the Museum of Modern Art.
This heady start created unrealistic expectations for an independent documentary maker. "I feel I was duped," Ms. Kramer said. "My first film was so easy."
She continued to make anthropological documentaries, often distributing them herself. Several have appeared on television in the United States and abroad, but they are most often shown at museums, universities and libraries. She has made five films in Haiti, but has also been drawn to odd corners of New York, where she has recorded diverse subjects like the Coney Island mermaids and the last of the cigar rollers.
Ms. Kramer said the idea for the Greenwich Village film clicked when she realized one day that her own neighborhood was rich anthropological territory. Even the streets were laid out in defiance of logic and order. (Specifically, the moment came while she was being entertained by an elderly character standing in line at the original Murray's cheese shop.) She was further inspired by an exhibition she saw on bohemian life at the Museum of the City of New York. There she learned that, long before jazz and folk music came along, Greenwich Village had welcomed the 19th-century avant-garde, writers like Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.
She also read "Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way," a quirky history by Terry Miller. Ms. Kramer collaborated with Mr. Miller for a while, but then he died of AIDS, a sorrowful part of Village legacy.
Though Ms. Kramer said she wasn't particularly interested in history, Greenwich Village was a logical subject for her. "I hate to sound like a generational cliché," she said, "but I was very interested in Kerouac." She grew up in Westchester but as a teenager in the 1960's was drawn to the Village, where hippies had replaced the Beats in a thriving counterculture. She went to college in Denver for a time because Kerouac had written about the city. Before returning to New York and enrolling at N.Y.U., she drifted through many bohemian enclaves: in San Francisco, Provincetown, the Virgin Islands. She made leather bags and sold them. She worked as a waitress.
During the years she was filming, many Village mainstays disappeared. Behavior that was once considered scandalous no longer shocks. But Ms. Kramer doesn't want her movie to be viewed as a requiem. "I don't want people to say, 'Oh how sad, it's all over,' " she said. "I want it to be a celebration." Then she added, "But it is over."