Word: isak
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...chief servant, Justina (a delicious turn by Harriet Andersson), has the butch haircut and sadistic ca prices of a prison-camp guard. In this house of silent horror the children can take refuge only in dreams of escape - to the arms of an old family friend, the Jew Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), whose house has some old, dark secrets that, in the mind of a child, can seem as exciting as black magic...
...other film maker has put these beliefs to such rigorous artistic tests as Bergman. Here, though, he has a merry time juggling his three weighty balls, maneuvering his characters and his audience from one house to another, from reverie to terror to awe. This is a movie where, as Isak says, "anything can happen." A nude statue can beckon to a wide-eyed boy; Fanny and Alexander can disappear from inside a steamer trunk; the ghost of Oscar Ekdahl can return home for a chat with his old, living mother. Such is the unique chicanery of movies, and Ingmar Bergman...
Hemingway made it his happiest hunting ground. Isak Dinesen, in Out of Africa, compared it to England in the 18th century, when an aristocrat might possess a "lovely landscape and a multitude of servants." For Cyril Connolly, however, the East African colony of Kenya was no paradise lost. It was the site of a 1941 murder that obsessed the British essayist and critic for a decade. By the time Connolly died in 1974, he had come tantalizingly close to finding the answer to the question that had mesmerized two generations of colonial society: Who shot Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl...
Like many of her contemporaries, Thurman prepared for the task with a concentration that amounted to fanaticism. She learned Danish and followed the tracks of Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen, through Europe, Africa and the U.S. In the Dinesen family's country house, she was allowed to stay the night: "Can you imagine what it was like, lying in bed with the scent of roses and the ticking of clocks in every room, and downstairs were all those papers and letters locked away...
Those amateurs have more than a love of their subjects. Judith Thurman views the practice as a form of alchemy. Describing the clear consomme made by Isak Dinesen's African cook, she writes, "You keep the spirit, but discard the rough ingredients: eggshells and raw bones. You then submit them to fire and patience. And the clarity comes at the end like a magic trick." The recipe stands as a metaphor for all well-written Lives...