Otis Ike and Ivete Lucas’ One Big Misunderstanding brings together four years of the duo’s film and photography documentation of Vietnam War reenactments.  Throwing themselves into the reality and theater of reenactments in Pennsylvania and Texas, Ike and Lucas emerge with a story that tries to understand its participants and their role in America’s struggle, if now marginalized, to come to terms with an unpopular and misunderstood war.

Few would consider re-staging the Vietnam War a form of recreation, yet reenactments regularly take place all over the country by a dedicated group of enthusiasts.  Ike, a native of Pennsylvania and the son of a Vietnam vet, was introduced to this subculture through a chance encounter at a rural flea market with a full-time military surplus vendor named Bubba, who comes to act as the duo’s guide into the guarded world of reenacting.

Bubba’s crew of  “living historians” emerges as a group dominated by young men on the fringe of society.  Each is drawn to the scene by a combination of veteran appreciation, unrealized military ambitions, and their individual patriotism; however, the opportunity to role-play and the desire to own the look and feel of actors in such epic films as Full Mental Jacket and Platoon is unmistakable. As Ike and Lucas are inducted as reenactors and “war correspondents,” these sentiments increasingly seem at odds, embodying the complicated history of the war and America’s ongoing process of understanding it.

Equally confounding are the corresponding stills, shot in color slide and black and white film. The color images are clearly staged tableaus but the black and white images are disquieting vagaries, which feel inextricably more “real.” Such ambiguity calls to mind the contested authenticity of Robert Capa’s infamous The Falling Soldier (Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936).

Where One Big Misunderstanding ends, an understanding emerges of the unresolved lessons of war and their permutation in American culture.

One Big Misunderstanding is presented in conjunction with FotoFest Houston, 2012.