First Case, Second Case is Kiarostami’s moral parabola, filmed with difficulty at the dawn of the Iranian Revolution. A persistent knock on something disrupts the lesson. Trying to detect the culprit, the teacher expels seven boys from the back of the classroom, where the noise originated. The boys have a choice—to either betray the person responsible or show solidarity and share the punishment. These two choices are commented on by the pupils’ parents and representatives of the Iranian authorities, their often opposing views revealing the dialectics of relations between a person and a collective, order and resistance, opposition and power, which becomes especially acute in an era of political change. The screening is preceded by Kiarostami’s short Tribute to the Teachers—a documentary portrait of experienced teachers and their grown-up students, some of whom have also become pedagogues. Garage Screen presents the Russian premiere of the restored films.
First Case, Second Case centers around an unsolvable ethical dilemma, one of the key issues for Kiarostami. Dissecting the conflict between the teacher and the students, the director explores and tests the concepts of friendship, betrayal, solidarity, order, resistance, conscience, and responsibility, while also posing the fundamental question of who is really to blame for what happened—the rioting kids, the teacher who aggravated the confrontation, or the school (aka social) system as such, that forces its actors to behave this way and not otherwise.
Shot, miraculously enough, during the Iranian Revolution, this half documentary, half feature film became the most interesting document of its era, revealing, like a litmus test, the mobility of society and morality in a transitional historical period. Analyzing the conflict and the two options of its resolution, Kiarostami demonstrates how society, power, and an ordinary person behave under rapidly changing circumstances. According to the director, the film tackles the ideology of denunciation and exposes the connection between lack of education and a willingness to swear allegiance to the dictatorship. The picture was immediately banned, with one of the commenting protagonists, a high-ranking representative of the Iranian Revolution, subsequently executed.
Formally speaking, First Case, Second Case can be labeled a modernist experiment. For the first time here, Kiarostami dismantles the wall between the film and the audience, problematizing the very space of cinema perception, always political and ambivalent. The documentary scenes in the cinema, featuring a movie projector and how actual spectators watch the game part on the movie screen, shift the focus from the events in the school to their ambiguous perception and subjective—since they are always ideologized—interpretations, anticipating Kiarostami’s future works, that show a person’s way, each time unique, of seeing and evaluating reality through cinema, and cinema through the prism of one’s own experience.
The films will be screened in Persian with Russian subtitles.
First Case, Second Case, 1979. 53 min.
Tribute to the Teachers, 1977. 17 min.