Following Caribou Via Rupta from the Early Hunting Film to Jerry Evans’s Apaja’lujik (2019)

ABSTRACT: This article traces the aesthetic and historiographic concepts of linearity and rupture from the settler-colonial film archive, American Mutoscope and Biograph’s short hunting film Stalking and Shooting Caribou, Newfoundland (1907), to contemporary Mi’kmaw visual artist Jerry Evans’s video installation Apaja’lujik—Bring Them Back (2019). To do so, it employs Jacques Derrida’s concept of via rupta for thinking along the broken paths of film history. By granting agency to environmental forces, including caribou, these moving images also locate rupture through their cinematographic lines, the panning shot and the tracking shot, where via rupta is decidedly formal.