A chronicle of queer lust set against a greasy metallic environment of the last days of a factory that is about to shut down. Among the workers forced to idle away until the end of the week, Jacques, a young technician is busy dismantling a machine while, without noticing it, turning on some of the men around him!
On a hot Sunday morning, Nathalie Sanchez, an unemployed hair stylist, walks across the Causses plateau in search of a shepherd. When she finds one, he tells her that he has lost his flock. They walk together and while chatting they meet several times a shepherd's son turned outlaw, Carol Izba. The latter, despite being pursued by a famous bounty killer, Pool, proves unable to leave the region...
Together, the three Bertrand brothers work their farm in a small Savoyard village. In 1972, they took the enormous risk to invest in the construction of an ultra modern stable for 82 milk cows. With modern organisation, they hoped to lead a better life. Almost 30 years later, the farm is successful. Their work is meticulous and the milk is graded top quality. The human cost is much more sombre. Indeed these thirty years can be summarised in one word : work. The brothers are bachelors and – each one now over sixty years old – a bitterness when they recall their past. The younger brother says it himself: "It's an economic success, but it's a human failure...".
Sonnet is a cyborg/esper from a harsh background and now trained to be the ultimate warrior and most powerful weapon in the world. She is sent to Japan to watch Komatsuzaki Lan, who is thought to be controlled by the rage of the esper Akai Kiba (Crimson Fang). Lan is a quiet girl who knows she's different from everybody else and starts to show signs of Crimson Fang after coming into contact with Sonnet. In the course of fighting with Lan, Sonnet starts to rediscover her humanity. At the same time Lan has to fight to retain her humanity and control the Crimson Fang.
In the mid-1990s, Alexander Grothendieck, a genius mathematician, retired for good. We lose track. Winner of the Fields Medal (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize), this man had brought to the mathematical world one of his greatest theoretical advances. Its intellectual domination was assured. But in 1988 he turned down the Crafoord Prize and its million and a half dollars.
For how long have we been laughing? Are human beings the only ones to laugh? In the past, scientists tended to neglect such questions of laughter, leaving them to the philosophers. Jacques Mitsch's A NATURAL HISTORY OF LAUGHTER explores recent scientific attempts to explicate this most elusive of human faculties, undertaken by scientists who see it as a means of approaching some of the larger mysteries of neurology and human behavior.
Portrait of Hermann Heinzel.
