RECOMMENDED BOOKS AND FILMS

by Writer/Director Vitaly Sumin

Chapter 1 - Personal Preferences

"But...What's hidden behind the Masks/Words?!."

"From Womb To Tomb" (short film)- Voice Over

(Three pictures: selected shots - "From Womb To Tomb")

"To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all"

"The Western Canon" by Harold Bloom

I'm taking the liberty of citing a passage from Lisa Pinckard's interview with me: "...One pays for the discoveries of the laws of the Universe with his/her body and soul. These discoveries lie beyond the principle of "Good" and "Bad" (or should we say "God" and "Devil"?..) and has nothing to do with morality. Are most of the geniuses of the classical literature the sorcerers putting the needles into wax figures of their enemies (and --to a lesser degree--even friends)?.. 

I may be lucky - I've read so many good books... Is there any book I fell in love with while reading and still keep warm feeling about? As of this writing (November 2nd, 2006), several authors come to mind:

ALEXANDER GRIN	She Who Runs on the Waves
	Purpursegel (or Scarlet Sails)
	and other books
2 years ago my younger brother died in a St. Petersburg's hospital of an overdose of alcohol. About 300 highly diverse people (city fathers, actors,  businessmen, street drunkards, factory workers, 2 judges, etc) attended the funeral. One of the guys whom I hardly knew asked my opinion about Paulo Coelho. I said I've never heard about him. Even more people showed up at the evening party. I brought with me a writing pad and passed it around asking everybody to write something about my brother. They loved him. The guy who mentioned Coelho gave me a present - "The Alchemist".  I put the book aside and didn't read it until this year. Some of the basics of the book's philosophy reminded me about Alexander Grin's metamorphoses: "If you follow your dream – then it will be realized " (at least in the book!..)  In any event, I was rewarded.
	PAULO COELHO                     and other books

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
	Fairy Tales and Stories

MILAN KUNDERA
	The Unbearable Lightness of Being

WILLIAM SAROYAN
	The Human Comedy

MICHAEL BAKHTIN	Rabelais and His World
	Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
	The Dialogic Imagination

JOHN FOWLES
	The Magus

ROBERT MUSIL
	Tonka

ARTURO PEREZ-REVERTE
	The Club Dumas
To be continued

  DOSTOEVSKY'S BOOKS

The Idiot Crime and Punishment
	"The Idiot" and  "Crime and Punishment" on which the stories of our two next films "Idiot, LA", a contemporary international thriller, and "Crime and Punishment, LA" , transported to LA during the riots of 1993, are based (Please check New Projects).

Chapter 3: Friendly Spirit

If you want to better understand/analyze the message of love in "Shades of Day”, we would like to suggest the following films (partial list):

"Wild Strawberries"	"Breaking the Waves"	"Casablanca"	"Les Visiteurs du Soir" ("The Devil's Envoys")
by Ingmar Bergman	by Lars von Trier with Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård.	with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman	by Marcel Carné

"2046"	"City Lights"	"White Nights"("Le Notti Blanche")
by Kar Wai Wong	by Charles Chaplin.              "One of the all-time greats"	by Lucino Visconti with Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Shell – (prix of the Venice Film Festival, 1957). This is the closest adaptation of Dostoevsky's story set in the Italian port city of Livorno in the midst of the 20th Century

"Jules and Jim"	"Chinatown"	"Open Hearts"	"The Elephant Man"
by Francois Truffaut with Jeanne Moreau ("probably, the best film by Truffaut")	by Roman Polanski with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway-(I love LA!..)	by Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen	by David Lynch

Dolls	"L'important C'est D'Aimer" ("Important Is To Love")	"Blow Up"
by Takeshi Kitano	by Andrzej Zulawski with mysterious and splendid Romy Schneider and the great, crazy and unique Klaus Kinski. I had the privilege to be his personal friend during the strange years I spent in Paris. Klaus was supposed to play major parts in two of my films, including Leo in "Idiot" based on Dostoevsky's novel. It was a dream of his lifetime to play Count Leo, which I didn't know when I first approached him about the part. Unfortunately, Klaus is no longer with us. Worth finding.	by Michelangelo Antonioni

"Beyond The Clouds"	"Un Coeur En Hiver"   ("A Heart in Winter")	"Quelques Jours avec Moi" ("Several Days with Me")
by Michelangelo Antonioni with John Malkovich	by Claude Sautet with Daniel Auteuil and Emanuelle Behart	by Claude Sautet with Daniel Auteuil and Sandrine Bonnaire. This film was released theatrically through the art houses in the US in 1995. I saw it in LA. Worth finding.

"Deja Vu"	"Before Sunrise, "Before Sunset"		"Love Me If You Dare"
by Henry Jaglom. Henry's noodling, searching, utterly un-commercial pictures (with dialogue largely improvised) are as personal as novels	By Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy		by Guillaume Caneth who takes the traditional l'amour fou scenario and runs it through a pinball machine...

"Choose Me"	"Exotica"	"Demonlover"	"Scarlet Sails"
by Alan Rudolph with Genevieve Bujold and Keith Carradine	by Atom Egoyan	by Olivier Assayas	based on Alexander Grin's book

L'Amour à Mort ( Love Unto Death )	"She, Who Runs On the Waves"	"Ugetsu"
by Alain Resnais	by Pavel Lubimov and Alexander Galich. This film is the best and the closest to Alexander Grin's spirit I've seen so far. Some info can be found on an interesting site devoted to sci-fi/fantasy and managed by Sergei Berezhnoi . I'm not aware of a version of this film with English subtitles. Worth finding.	by Kenji Mizoguchi

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