Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: In the crater of the volcano is the first ever exhibiton dedicated to the filmmaking couple in Portugal. Their oeuvre, developed over more than six decades and comprising approximately fifty films made in different countries (Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland), is a landmark of modern cinema and an expressive example of a truly interlingual, transnational and pan-European cinema. Some of the characteristics that Straub and Huillet share with Manoel de Oliveira include their rigorous construction of shots, denaturalisation of actors’ performances, focus on the materiality of the word, questioning of the past and appropriation of works by other authors, from the fields of literature, music or painting. In this exhibition, the importance given to place and nature by the filmmakers serves as a gateway to what, in the wake of their adaptation of Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles, Straub defined as ‘utopian communism’, or in other words, a synthesis between Marxism and ecology. In this visit, Barbara Ulrich Straub will guide us through the questions and the unquietness that rises over the sounds and images which they have painstakingly created.