Finding Haesook
- 10 hours ago
- 4 min read
On memory, loss, and documenting what is fading.
Ancram, New York -- There is a place in documentary filmmaking where secondary characters drift toward the center of the lens. They slide into the main story from the kitchen, the workplace, the frontlines, or simply as the unexpected guest who happens to be in the room. They arrive to enrich the argument, to add a layer of substance to the subject. I have always regarded such presences with skepticism and subjected them to a vetting more rigorous, perhaps, than I would apply in literature. Whatever holds an audience in a documentary should rest on documentary evidence, not on an entourage of colorful supporting players.
The exceptions are the ones everybody knows: the skeleton in the closet, an injustice committed and revealed, the overlooked circumstance that tells us something essential about the subject. Even then I haven't always been open to the story evolving in front of me. My attention can be jealous of the central idea.
All that changed this week.
Professor Haesook Kim is Paul Chaleff's wife, and she is always around him. Not necessarily at the center of what is happening, and certainly not demanding the attention of the camera. She is simply there. At breakfast. At dinner. Moving through the house. Learning to play the piano. Sitting nearby while we work. Joining us for a walks.
And very quickly one understands that Haesook is not peripheral to Paul's universe.
Long before I knew anything about her academic life, I began to understand her through the way Paul and those closest to him acknowledge her presence. There is tenderness there, and something resembling a loving memory of everything she accomplished and of what she continues to represent to the people around her. It doesn't take a visitor long to see that Paul's life is being shaped by her presence, much as he shapes the clay from which he has built the world around him.
Clay is not the only element that has shaped him. Paul has often spoken to me about an accident in 1968, when he was twenty and studying biology at City College: he nearly drowned in the Gatineau river, and his friend, Bob Chernick, did not survive. The experience changed the direction of his life. Years later, water came back into the work on his own terms: several of his sculptures are fountains. The story returns to the conversation from time to time, and like many of Paul’s stories it explains something larger: the way an event keeps moving beneath a life long after it has passed.
I find myself thinking about that river differently now. Haesook lives with dementia, and her presence is a reminder of the next bend, of the force with which time carries all of us forward. As we struggle to capture memories, she struggles to remember who she is, and who we are.
I have spent most of my professional life trusting the camera as an instrument against forgetting. We record voices and faces. We collect photographs. We return to places and people. We ask them to tell us what happened. We build archives from fragments and call the result a film. We preserve memory, or at least we like to think we do. Haesook is forcing me to reconsider that certainty.
There is a dimension to this that I could not have anticipated when we arrived. Haesook herself devoted a significant part of her intellectual life to precisely this struggle against disappearance. A sociologist and feminist scholar, educated at Ewha Womans University in Seoul and later at Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate in sociology. Her scholarship concerned women, law and Korean society. She wrote about women entering Korea's legal profession, about lives and contributions that risked slipping from the historical record. She spent part of her life looking for ways to keep others from being forgotten.
Now I find myself pointing a camera toward her and confronting how little a camera can actually preserve.
It can preserve the sound of Haesook's voice. It can preserve a gesture, a smile, the way she looks at Paul, or the way Paul looks at her. It can record breakfast on a particular morning in Ancram, and years from now it may allow us to enter that room again. But it cannot enter the place where memory resides and retrieve what has faded. That distinction has mattered more to me with each day here.
Haesook is not a metaphor for dementia. Nor should her illness become a narrative device in a film about her husband. She is Haesook Kim: scholar, teacher, feminist, wife, a woman with an intellectual history of her own.
And yet her presence has changed the way I look at the man I came here to film. I see Paul differently because I see him with Haesook. I see the care. The routines. The accommodations that become almost invisible because they are repeated every day. I see a life shaped not only by clay and fire and decades of work, but by love, responsibility and time.
I understand something else, too, about the hundreds of objects surrounding us in Paul's studio. They survived. Clay survives remarkably well. Fire transforms it and, paradoxically, gives it permanence. A vessel made decades ago can sit before us essentially unchanged while the hands that made it grow older and the memories surrounding its making begin to fade.
Perhaps this is why Haesook has moved so close to the center of my lens without ever displacing Paul. She has not become another story. She has made Paul's story deeper.
I came to Ancram determined to preserve something of Paul Chaleff's world. I leave on Sunday with a more complicated understanding of what preservation means. We point the camera at people we love, at places we fear will disappear, at hands making things, at faces trying to remember.
We know perfectly well that we cannot stop the river.
We record anyway.
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