Ulrike Ottinger weaves her personal memories of Parisian bohemianism and the serious social, political and cultural upheavals of the time into a cinematic “figure poem.”

In what way can reflecting on worlds very far from our own, either in space or time, bear relevance for us today? Is there a scientific legacy - a before and after Lévi-Strauss - in anthropology? This documentary retraces the intellectual path of the author of "Tristes tropiques" ("A World on the Wane") and "La Pensée sauvage" ("The Savage Mind"), Claude Lévi-Strauss. The anthropologist and founder of structural anthropology in France is portrayed via numerous selected extracts of interviews he has given since the 1960s. The film is a fascinating introduction into the mind of a man who is interested in all men. Lévi-Strauss has great confidence (in spite of a pessimistic view of our contemporary world) in the creative capacities of the human mind.