This film is a poem from Jean-Pierre Thiébaud, one of the workers participating in the Chris Marker-animated Groupe Medvedkine, and who took part in the 1967 Strike (see the film A bientôt j'espère).

It is a visual lyric, against war and capitalism, a call for emancipation.

“Far from all the luxuries of cinema, a young man has made this film alone in his attic; the film with the lowest budget ever, since it didn’t cost any more than the price of the batteries from the tape recorder (…). He took the slides from the archives of the CCPPO (an arts center in a working-class neighborhood in Besançon, France); the text, from his own pen; the celluloid, strictly calculated, ill-gotten;(…) Le Traîneau-échelle is still a yell, the open heart of a man who wakes up at night to count the B52s sent to drown a town under a rain of napalm.” (Roger Journot, director of the CCPPO)