Disenchanted Presents,Haunted Pasts,and Dystopian Futures: deferred millennialism in the cinema of Meng Jinghui

Meng Jinghui's Chicken Poets (2002) presents a postmodern meditation on the state and fate of Chinese cultural production, intellectual discourse, and social relations at the turn of the century and the millennium. Albeit released two years after 2000, it retains symptomatic traits of the fin-de-siècle and millennial mentality and is therefore examined as an instance of ‘deferred’ or ‘residual’ millennialism. As typical of such narratives, it merges visions of hope and horror, dream and disaster. The film is founded on a dialogic intersection of multiple ‘time–spaces’ of signification, each providing a separate locus of reflection and critique. Besides disclosing distinct discursive targets, the structural interplay of these different chronotopes also establishes generic distinctions within the narrative. Chicken Poets relates to the present as a self-reflexive Künstlerfilm addressing the conflict of creation and commodity in times of mechanical reproduction and mediated stardom. Its enquiry into the past triggers ghostly resurrections and nostalgic visions of compensation and resistance. Its imagination of the future generates apocalyptic fantasies of disaster while disclosing prospects of redemption.