By Summers Henderson

THE WORLD ROTATED on a strange new axis in 1969. You may or may not choose to remember that in Washington, D.C., Richard Nixon decided to start secretly bombing Cambodia, while in Chicago, Abbie Hoffman and cohorts stood trial for the previous year's upset of the Democratic National Convention, and in Los Angeles the Manson clan randomly decided to end some lives. The world as they knew it was collapsing, and somewhere in the rubble an S.F. State student, aspiring filmmaker Ralph Arlyck, documented a four-year-old boy named Sean running barefoot around the streets of the Haight, talking about his distrust of the cops, and bragging that he had eaten pot.

When it screened back in 1969, "Sean," a 15-minute film, gained national notoriety for its vision of a precocious kid living with his hippie family. It was a cinéma vérité portrait meant to show that children were still developing in the same old ways they always had – despite the social "disruption." However, to some at least, the film symbolized the decline of civilization. Sean, it was assumed by some, would grow up to be a delinquent, a liability to society, if not another Manson.

Cut to 2002. Sean Farrell is still living in San Francisco. He's not one of the drifters populating the streets of Haight-Ashbury. As it turns out, he has become what viewers of his 1969 self would never have dreamed: a well-adjusted electrician who aspires to go to law school while he responsibly raises his four-year-old son.

Thirty-plus years after the fact, Arlyck hasn't let the topic drift away. Like Michael Apted with his Seven Up series, he's creating a longitudinal study of a child developing into an adult in a world gone haywire many times over. But Arlyck's style has more to do with Ross McElwee's self-reflexivity than with Apted's cool surveying. It's not just an easy follow-up made to fill in the blanks of one person's story; Arlyck is also pointing the camera at himself and adding his own chapter to the story of the '60s.

The new film is tentatively titled Following Sean, and Arlyck was in town recently to screen a fine cut to prospective investors. The film follows the adult Sean during a few years of his life, observing how values mutate over generations. Not surprisingly, the film finds Sean responding to economic imperatives: while Sean's father, Johnny, builds a boat in the basement of his home in the Haight in the late '60s and later takes his three kids out of school for a yearlong bus tour of Mexico, Sean scrambles to work multiple jobs in 1990s San Francisco.

The film is still being edited, but in its current version it begins with Arlyck's voice-over contemplating the era, while we see San Francisco, the original "Sean," and representative figures of the time: Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary. We hear in his voice that Arlyck is skeptical about how much that era really revolutionized American culture. Footage of stoned hippies implies that while pot may be medicinal, it's certainly not motivational. We learn by following Sean's story that he had his share of childhood indulgences but feels a sense of responsibility now, the kind of duty his father was escaping. Still, he hasn't completely rejected his family's radicalism, and Arlyck seems genuinely surprised when Sean contemplates selling Amway.

Work is a recurring theme in this film in progress, largely because it's a major theme in Sean's life. His grandfather was Archie Brown, a famous figure in San Francisco labor and leftist politics, and Arlyck includes footage of Brown giving dissenting testimony, and eventually being dragged away by the police, before the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco in 1960. Brown was one of the key links between the Communist Party and labor union leftists of the '30s and '40s and the political dissidents of the '60s, so it's no surprise his kids were part of the era's counterculture. Brown is survived by his wife, Hon Brown, who is seen in the film as a 78-year-old matriarch, still vibrant with political ideals. The most interesting figure is Sean's father, who never really settled down and is still a nonconformist philosopher, as well as a part-time handyman.

What's intriguing about the film is how it weaves together the stories of two separate families: Sean's and Arlyck's. The filmmaker's conservative parents are shown on a 1968 visit to Arlyck's Haight apartment from their suburban New York home. They look a little dumbstruck. But when Arlyck later films his parents reminiscing, he's surprised to find out they briefly flirted with Communist group meetings in the '40s. Arlyck also includes footage that shows the parallels between the difficulties of his marriage and those of Sean's parents', and we even see Arlyck's sons living in Berkeley, expressing a skepticism about the 1960s that is similar to Sean's.

Of his decision to lend his own story to the picture, Arlyck says, "It happened in spite of me. I started out trying to make the film about something else, and the personal elements tended to weave in gradually. The more and more I looked at the questions, the more and more they seemed to get turned back to me." Fortunately, he has the footage to tell his own part in the story. An inveterate shooter of film, Arlyck has a trove of personal material, including early moments between him and his young wife, who is nervous in front of the camera. And of course Arlyck is part of the original "Sean," as the offscreen voice probing the mischievous Haight kid with questions.

Arlyck's own involvement with San Francisco in the '60s is a story that's not entirely told in the film. He recalls the city's allure after he graduated from Columbia's journalism school in 1966. "There was a lot of mythology associated with San Francisco, and I suspect there still is." He had seen a film by Irving Saraf, produced at KQED, and drove out thinking he'd find a job at the public TV station. He wound up writing for the Bay Guardian before transferring his energy to filmmaking. As one of his first films, "Sean" was a surprising success. It received national distribution when the Beatles picked it to screen before Yellow Submarine, and it eventually played on public television.

Arlyck eventually moved back to New York state and taught film production at various colleges, including Vassar. His documentaries include Godzilla Meets Mona Lisa, about Paris's controversial Pompidou Center art museum, and Current Events, about how people respond to the overwhelming stream of unspeakable events, disaster in foreign lands, and personal tragedy flowing from the nightly news shows. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.

Arlyck's films generally include him and his family, and in the current film we can see his agitated sons acquiesce to appearing, yet again, on camera. Yet Sean seems surprisingly unruffled by the attention. Arlyck explains that "he's still so charming and disarming, with the same qualities he had as a four-year-old." And the filmmaker isn't too worried about the exposure this will bring to the family. "The nice thing is that Sean doesn't have an agenda about this. He and his family are very gutsy. They're very confident, and they're not worried how they're going to look, how they're going to come off. That's something that's been very striking to me."