Open one of the monographs on a film genre or a national cinema that sit in their separate zones on library shelves, at least one that was written over the last forty years, and you stand a good chance of finding a less monolithic characterisation than the titles often suggest. The a priori coherence of both film genres and national cinemas sits under sustained and mounting critical pressure. While genres and national assertions remain consequential for understanding cinema, a broadening consensus holds them to be constitutively contested. To position the French western film within this dynamic relationship it is useful to trace the lines of these arguments, not to rehearse their scope and nuance (impossible and unnecessary in these few pages) but to expose how the epistemologies of film genres and of national cinemas are not as distinct as they might appear.

The characterisation of narrative, dramatic, literary and artistic genres dates to the ancient Greeks, and over the centuries has proven to be a notoriously fraught endeavour. The definition of genre in film is no exception. When it emerged as an area of scholarly inquiry, the theorisation of film genre often entailed the examination of chosen representative works with the goal of identifying constitutive ‘semantic’ (lexical, iconographic) and ‘syntactic’ (structural, narrative) markers. However, the assumption that discrete film genres exist as empirical fact, waiting for their essential traits to be discovered and catalogued, is conspicuously unsafe even for a genre with as apparently strong and distinct features as the western. As early as 1973, Andrew Tudor observed a circularity that plagues definitions of genre grounded in the study of representative films: if by accepted benchmarks of ‘westernness’ a film like John Ford's Stagecoach seems undoubtedly to exemplify the genre, it is hardly surprising, given that these benchmarks were culled from Stagecoach and other films like it in the first place.

The definition of film genres yields time and again to such ‘empiricist's dilemmas’. A film widely hailed as the ‘first western’, The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), was made before ‘the western’ was a recognised category of film, and in the context of its initial release would more aptly be called a railroad picture, a chase film or a crime film.