Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, about the daily life of an Inuit man and his family, is widely regarded as the first documentary and a masterwork of cinema. It is a founding manifestation of what British documentarian John Grierson would later call the “creative treatment of actuality,” combining a highly aestheticized sensibility with an exacting fascination with Indigenous practices that, by the time of the film’s shooting, had long since been antiquated. The film is also an instantiation of documentary’s “original sin,” its ethnographic gaze raising problems of appropriation, colonization, and exploitation that remain stubbornly central to contemporary documentary filmmaking. This course examines the film’s difficult and undeniable influence in film studies, anthropology, and documentary practice through screenings and discussions of Flaherty’s other films, Indigenous art and media, archival decolonization, and scholarly reflection. [Tracks S and C]