Aby Warburg Metamorphosis and Memory (Judith Wechsler, 2016)

This documentary on the life and work of Aby Warburg, traces the development of his ideas in their historical context. From his early studies on the early Italian Renaissance to his ventures in the American Southwest observing Hopi and Zuni ritual dances in 1895, Warburg sought the legacy of ancient Greece in the images and symbols of cultures, which he followed through iconographic studies that he pioneered. He sought connections between gesture and art in antiquity, the Renaissance and modern times. Underneath the seeming rationality of antiquity and the Renaissance, he sensed conflict and irrationality.