This past spring, the Museum of Modern Art presented the first New York retrospective of work by the leading American documentary filmmaker Charlotte Zerin, whose portraits of visual and performing artists like Christo, Willem de Kooning, Ella Fitzgerald, and Arshile Gorky are richly textured and revealing. The Detroit-born Zwerin was inspired early on more by newsreels than theatrical narratives. She established a film club at Wayne State University, later worked at CBS News, and then joined Drew Associates, the filmmaking group that pioneered "driect cinema" in America in the 1960s. There she met David and Albert Maysles and began making documentaries with them, including three significant films in this retrospective: Salesman (1969), Gimme Shelter (1970), and Running Fence (1978). She has continued her award-winning work in the documentary units of ABC and NBC and has been a producer at PBS.