Watch the trailer (at followingsean.com).
The most vivid image that arises from Following Sean, Ralph Arlyck’s documentary covering a thirty-year stretch of American counter-cultural history, is the filmmaker’s description of tourist busses traveling the streets of San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury district in the late-1960s. They crawl through the crowded neighborhood, taking middle Americans on a guided tour of the hippie “freak show” that had engulfed that part of the city. In response, many of those “freaks” march alongside the tour busses holding up mirrors.
Watching Following Sean feels like looking into the filmmaker’s own hand-mirror as he stares pensively at himself. The hybrid documentary/memoir follows two threads. Sean, a “flower child” who the filmmaker first encountered in 1969, when his family lived at Haight and Cole, became the four-year-old subject of a short documentary that Arlyck made while he was a film student at San Francisco State University, during that department’s heyday. The film became a worldwide sensation and jump-started Arlyck’s documentary career. Thirty years later, the filmmaker returned to San Francisco (during the dot com boom) and began filming Sean a second time. The bookends of these interviews with Sean elicit an unexpected response in the filmmaker, causing him to reflect on his own progress during that same period.
What’s brave about this examination is that the two family’s stories don’t reflect well on the filmmaker. Where Sean’s family is made up of activists (his maternal grandparents were radical union organizers and his parents are genuine hippies, their lives devoted to the pursuit of personal freedom and spiritual development), Arlyck’s seems to be made up of observers, folks who support the cause but don’t get caught up in it. Arlyck underlines these differences, cross-cutting between footage of Sean’s grandfather as he is dragged in protest from a HUAC hearing and his own father’s admission that he attended communist camp just to pick up girls. There is a luxury to being an observer, to being present but remaining separate and Arlyck seems to be questioning this position.
This reminded me of a passage from the classic documentary Berkeley in the Sixties, which spent its first half chronicling the work of a number of mavericks in the Free Speech movement, who lived lives based on their convictions and acted forcefully for change. That action caused a counter-culture to arise and that counter-culture was broadcast to the rest of the world, attracting many to the Bay Area to join in. But those people were attracted to an image of a counter-culture and based their lives not on the underlying set of principles that started it, but on the image alone. Is this the great disconnect between the baby boomers’ view of what they stood for and what has actually come to pass during their preeminence?