Guido Sodo and François Laurent have been working together for some years on a project which reproposes Neapolitan music and songs from the 13th century on in a classical-contemporaneous key, and which they have presented in concert in Italy and abroad.

The duo’s activity has been characterised by the task offered them by the Cineteca di Bologna of accompanying the Neapolitan silent films live (among which Assunta Spina and Il miracolo), presented at the Moma in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in Haifa, at the Festival in Bologna and in other Italian and foreign film archives. On this occasion Paolo Caruso and Roberto Bartoli join the duo. Both are musicians who have already worked with Guido Sodo in the Neapolitan music group “Cantoediscanto”.

“At the base of Fred Niblo’s film there is again Blasco Ibañez. June Mathis returns to scriptwriting, and the result is extraordinary. Valentino is a ‘zapaterin’, young, proletarian, a strong image of a just sexual aggressiveness justly controlled by the ethical and ethnic, cultural and catholic codes. Just in the sense of straight? Blood and Sand is extraordinary, and unpredictable, also for the insolence with which it relaunches that ambiguity which a film like Moran had attempted to tone down. Like in Moran, here too Valentino is a real body of flesh (muscles well evident through opportunely torn shirts), loaded nevertheless with highly dramatic density. and the first true embrace of this body is reserved for a man, for a bull-fighting companion who dies, in a long, acted, scene which brings with it a certain, almost embarrassing, emphasis of melodrama: Valentino holds his friend, he kisses him, he despairs, he hides his face in his arm, with a rapture until this moment not conceded to a woman. […] The end is well-known: abjection, redemption on the point of death, blood on the sand and sand on blood. Juan Gallardo dies, as Julio Desnoyers, for a woman (in her name, or for her fault; little does it matter that there she was an angel and here a devil), he dies after losing a woman, or renouncing her. He dies with the scene clothes, in the obligatory loneliness of the real Latin lover, belonging to all women and to none. The film was to be the greatest of his successes, before the second Sheikh”.

Paola Cristalli, Rodolfo Valentino: lo schermo della passione, Ancona, Transeuropa, 1996