Excerpt from an early episode (the second) of a new version of the popular talk show Vzgliad, co-hosted by Aleksandr Liubimov and Sergey Bodrov Jr., which aired weekly on the TV channel ORT in 1996-1999.
Post-Soviet
1996
This is an excerpt from the second episode of the new version of the popular talk show Vzgliad (1996-1999) which jump started and consolidated the image of Sergey Bodrov Jr. as an “anti-bourgeois hero” of sorts and an absolute icon of the 1990s--later also associated (after his role as Danila Bagrov in the blockbusters Brother 1 and 2) with violent forms of national resentment and revanchism. Bodrov started co-hosting the show after he reached early notoriety with his role in The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1996) but a few months before Brother, with which he rose to absolute stardom, was released. In the first episode of the series, the primary host, Aleksandr Liubimov, introduced Bodrov as part of a new chapter in Vzgliad’s history. The first few episodes established the show’s new format, in which Liubimov presented while sitting at the desk of his traditional TV studio in the Ostankino tower, wearing a business suit, while Bodrov hosted a more “down-to-earth,” informal, and overall youthful portion of the show on location from a Moscow bar. The show covered pressing and highly controversial issues of violence, identity, and social inequality. In the first three episodes co-hosted by Bodrov alone, it covered such issues as the Kotlyakovskoya Cemetery bombing, mass protests and violent repressions in Belarus, a national coal miners’ strike organized to protest several months of unpaid wages, and squatters resisting eviction from the “Bulgakov’s building,” in the center of Moscow. As part of this new format, Bodrov appeared to act as the voice of an “unfiltered,” popular common sense and resentment, often making in-passing despising remarks about the “bourgeois” and the wealthy and tacky “new Russians”—and barely resisting the temptation of “cussing” at the injustices described in the various interviews and reportages. Liubimov, in contrast, acts as the representative of a different—more middle-class, middle-aged, or bourgeois—common sense: “couldn’t the squatters just sell their art and use the profits to pay rent?” “Doesn’t the businesswoman-philanthropist from one of the stories deserve a spot in the iconostasis of the church, the renovation of which she has paid for?” Bodrov’s “populism” in the show is devoid of the chauvinism and xenophobia associated with his character Danila. But like Danila, “Bodrov-the-TV-personality” stands for a kind of “new sincerity” or strive for authenticity. The excerpt included here is preceded by interviews to a young Belorussian political activist who left the country to escape repressions and to a former leader of the student democratic movement at Moscow State University—with comments from Liubimov and the musician Andrey Makarevich, who appears as a special guest. The conversation revolves around the ideas of “romanticism” and youth rebellion, and at the end of it, Bodrov remarks that there is something “touchingly old-fashioned” in this idea, because being “romantic” or “rebellious” is not fashionable among young people anymore: what is really “stylish” now is “to be a bourgeois.” The next story shifts, somewhat unexpectedly, to a different kind of “romanticism” or authenticity: that of a guy who cut his finger off in order to convince his girlfriend to quit heroin. From there, the participants end up discussing, among other things, the idea of resisting other forms of addiction, like the then emerging “computer networks.”
Russia
Liubimov, Aleksandr (Alexander), Balabanov, Aleksei, and Bodrov Jr., Sergei
Russia and former Soviet Union
“Vzgliad.” Telekanal ORT. Nov 29, 1996. [YouTube (+file in shared folder): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FrqflMxvOs&list=PLY07NVFyt_aqajNmf4FwTpk-1aUTMvKia&index=34