Abstract
Starting from a new reading of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), I take the smile of Nanook as a guide to rediscuss crucial issues, revisiting essential problems that underlie the epistemological discussions of both cinema and anthropology: the problem of truth/falsity and fiction/reality, the way of producing knowledge, the staging of social life, the illusionism and anti-illusionism of social representations, the modes of representation of the other, or the problem of the indexicality of images as marks of their links with the world.
Keywords
Ethnography; representation; documentary; ethnographic film; Flaherty
