A Film Canon

If James Hilton's iconic novella responds to WWI with a sentimental nostalgia for Victorian England, then Wood's adaptation responds to WWII with the realisation that nostalgia itself is no longer a viable option, and must be replaced with a more poignant, drastic desire to escape the ravages of time altogether. To this end, screenwriters R.C. Sheriff, Claudine West and Eric Maschwitz foreground those episodes that collapse past into present, subverting the linearity, continuity and homogeneity of time. This is most explicit in the case of the framing device, which contains the entire narrative within a dying dream, as well as the heightened irrealism of the scene in which beloved schoolmaster Mr. Chipping (Robert Donat) meets his wife, Katherine (Greer Garson) atop one of the Alps - a middle- aged apprehension of love whose first symptom is the reflection that "Up here, there's no time, no growing old, nothing lost." However, the most evocative displacements are figured in terms of the omnipresent Brookfield school, whose extensive genealogy ensures that any event, or person, is simply a more nuanced version of an older one, producing a temporal slippage encapsulated in Terry Kilburn's performance of five generations of boys from the same family. In the same way, Chips' own life story turns on how he came to embody this slippage - or, alternatively, how he paradoxically came to be as if he had always been at the school - suggesting that it is his collective memory, rather than his personality, teaching strategies, or even sense of comedy, that produces his gravitas; or, more accurately, his inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish between memory and reality, past and present: "I do remember you...as you are now. In my mind, you remain boys."