When comic-strip artist Ben Katchor speaks, his voice sounds like it’s being played over an old phonograph. His speech is slow, cracking and seemingly out of place — just like the world in his strips.
Filmmaker Sam Ball, who also works as assistant director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, heard the siren call of that rusty voice molded by Yiddish and by New York.
So when Ball decided to make a short film about Katchor and his comic strips — the most current one, “Cardboard Valise,” runs in nearly a dozen papers around the nation, including S.F. Weekly and the Forward in New York — he made the voice another character.
“The intonations of his speech are from my grandparents’ generation,” said Ball, who is 30.
“His voice almost seems to be part of the fabric of New York City. I got off the phone with him and felt confirmed I wanted to make a film with his voice. The funny thing is, when we met, he’s a very photogenic and youthful guy.”
Ball’s 18-minute film, “Pleasures of Urban Decay,” has its world premiere at this year’s festival. The film is part of a program called “An Evening with Ben Katchor” that includes another short film about the artist, “Urban Doodles,” and a slide-show performance by Katchor himself, “Carfare City.”
“Pleasures of Urban Decay,” two years in the making, hones in on Katchor’s strips as they peek into anachronistic but instantly familiar places. Katchor’s most widely read strip has been “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.” Katchor’s most recent work is a full-length, comic-strip novel “The Jew of New York.”
“I started reading his strip, just half reading it. It was buried in the back pages of S.F. Weekly,” Ball said. “I started reading casually, then became addicted. Every time you read the strip you notice something different. It’s so layered.”
Ball began to see his own city, San Francisco, in the same way. Signs he never noticed before suddenly grew in meaning. The cracks in the sidewalk stood out more, he said.
“You walk away from Katchor’s book and the world looks like Ben’s world. He touches a nerve. What he sees in cities is universal,” Ball said.
Ball, who has a master’s degree in film from Stanford University, has made three other short films. With money he earned from an Anti-Defamation League award for his film about disabled people who make their own wheelchairs, Ball started production on the Katchor film.
The work intersperses close-ups of Katchor’s strips with wide-screen pans to find the strips as they are lived out in New York City. Filmed by coincidence on gray, rainy days, the picture ends up moody and tiring, like the feel at the end of a work day rather than on a sunny weekend.
“Ferne Perlstein, the director of photography, has a very calm eye. We walked around the city for a long time looking for layers of generations of experience,” Ball said.
Katchor comments during the film about how he draws the strips and why he’s drawn to not just the old-fashioned, but to the quirkiness of things that are out of date. He doesn’t give very much in the way of biography or personal details.
Ball sees the work as a Jewish film. “But I don’t think the word Jewish is even in the film. It doesn’t need to be. There is something almost talmudic about the way Katchor interprets the city, the way each detail is a symbol for something. But I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth, not being talmudically versed.”
He hopes the film will be picked up for television. He also plans to send it along with Katchor on his national book tour.
In that sense, Ball has taken on the mindset of a traveling salesman turned artist, who with a Jewish eye has discovered what he calls “a bizarre interpretation of America.” It’s a charming one, too.