"En rachâchant" is based on Marguerite Duras’ story Ah! Ernesto, about a young boy who refuses to go to school because they teach him things he doesn't know. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet have created some of the most intellectually demanding, formally austere, and yet politicized films in the history of postwar cinema. Prior to working with Huillet, his late wife and co-director, the French born Straub was an assistant to Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson. Their meeting in 1954 eventually resulted in a body of work of uncompromising rigour, defining not only New German Cinema in its attack on the conventions of film language and naturalistic acting, but the intellectual and formal potential of film art in general.
