A film in which Oleg Kovalov performs as actor. The Paper Eyes of Prishvin, a politically-tinted film about the pioneers of Soviet television, is in fact one of the first manifestations of Russian post-modernism, in which playing with genres and leitmotifs has a leading role. Like the film Confession by Tengiz Abuladze, that was released slightly earlier, the film demythologises the ideology and the aesthetics of the ‘Grand Style’, monumentalism in art. One of those who fell victim to that was Eisenstein, who is here portrayed as a caricature with a homosexual bent. In this film Oleg Kovalov plays the role of a symbolic Leningrad intellectual with glasses and a hat: a small victim of the great dictatorship. While he is not a professional actor, Kovalov manages to give his personality a timelessness that brings him unexpectedly close to the figures created by Nabokov.
