Save and Protect
Save and Protect
Of Angels and Flies
This chapter looks at the film Save and Protect (1989). Save and Protect is an epic and epically strange adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, located in a deliberately vague, timeless southwestern Soviet landscape—focused on the work and temporality of death and its intertwined relationship with human destiny and everyday actions. Within its central character, the film embodies the tensions between corporeality and spirituality, producing a very different final affect than Sokurov's three previous features: Lonely Voice of Man (1978), Mournful Insensitivity (1983), and Days of the Eclipse (1988). The film's plot is shattered into a variety of episodes that are only vaguely related to one another, and which each feature a series of idiosyncratic and recognizable characters. Save and Protect also features a considerable number of secondary characters, all taken, although in warped fashion, from the Flaubert novel. Sokurov has subtly combined the impersonal and demiurgic drives while allowing a place for chance and destiny in this film.
Keywords: Save and Protect, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, death, destiny, corporeality, spirituality
Columbia Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
