Locating the 1960s Filipino Western Genre

Abstract

The 1960s were deemed to be a dark age of Philippine cinema. The local film industry was at its downfall with bomba or sex films and Hollywood films filling up the theatres. With the heavy influx of foreign films, the industry found its survival through the imitations of foreign genre films, such as the themes of samurai, secret agent, intimate melodramas, and the Western. Known to be the most flexible genre, the Western, with its cowboy and mountain-valley themes, was one of the most duplicated in the local film industry. The study situates the Western genre in Philippine cinema. It articulates the process of how the local film industry appropriated and accommodated the genre within its native context. Utilizing Roland Robertson’s framework of glocalization, the study seeks to analyze the process of how the global phenomenon of the Western genre was transposed to the locality of the Philippine cinema, focusing on the two known local Western films Daniel Barrion (1964) and Ang Pagbabalik ni Daniel Barrion (1968). It further discusses aspects of the American Western that were appropriated within the Philippine condition and reality, which reflected indigenous themes and native concepts. This cinematic process subsequently created new ramifications on the genre, making the localized Western genre called the Filipino Western. Ultimately, the study mainly attempts to examine this largely neglected genre.