Looking at Runner & Listening to Auden's Poetry

At Literary Hub, Nick Ripatrazone watches Don Owen's 1962 directorial debut, Runner, a film commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada, about Toronto runner Bruce Kidd. In this film, Kidd is training for the Commonwealth Games; much later he became an Olympic runner for Canada. The narration is written by W.H. Auden and read aloud by Don Francks. "I spoke with Kidd about the 55-year-old film," Ripatrazone writes. "He was happy to have been a part of the film, but sad that all involved—from Owen on to photographers and sound editors—had since passed away. [...]Owen had long admired Auden, and contacted the poet early in the project." From there: 

Kidd said Owen “did a long interview with me, and took the tape and the rushes of the film to Switzerland, where Auden was staying at the time, and the result is the commentary.”

Auden included some of Kidd’s own “phrasings in what he wrote.” I asked Kidd what it felt like to have a canonical poet’s meditations about his running; he says Auden’s narration “always seemed over-the-top but it was like a huge ray of sunshine, I basked in it.” When he actually was able to watch the film, he “was stunned that it was so beautiful, such a work of art.”

One source of that beauty is Auden’s eternally poetic lines. Owen was an admirer of the great Greek poet Pindar, and asked Auden to capture the ancient bard’s spirit in the narration. Auden was equally taken by the Greek poet; years earlier, he’d sent his friend T.S. Eliot “an attempt at Pindar’s kind of verse in English.”

Read more at Literary Hub.