Round and Round and Consumed by Fire is one in a trilogy of videos based on events in Bolivian history and their effect on the country’s mytho-historic landscape. It is a reenactment of the shootout and subsequent death of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, nineteenth century American outlaws and leaders of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Historians believe that Butch and the Sundance Kid died in a shoot-out in San Vicente, Bolivia, a town in southern Bolivia where they had fled after robbing the payroll of the Aramayo Mining Co. The story was fictionalized in the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a film only loosely based on historical fact that popularized the legends of Butch and Sundance. Shot as a slow moving circular tracking shot, the camera tracks a circle around the entire periphery of a generic small Bolivian town main street during the gun fight. Only loosely based on the film mentioned above, this recreation of its final scene results in a diluted rendering of what may have been the original shoot out, if it, in fact, ever happened.
Single channel video; Blu-ray video; 8 minutes; color; sound