Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Film genre" in English language version.
AFI defines 'western' as a genre of films set in the American West that embodies the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier.
[...] the various elements of genre films, including conventions, iconography, settings, narratives, characters and actors.
As a term genre goes back to earliest cinema and was seen as a way of organizing films according to type. But it was not until the late 1960s that genre was introduced as a key concept into Anglo-Saxon film theory [...].
[...] Neale notes that most histories of the western film begin with The Great Train Robbery (1903), but when released it was promoted not as a western but marketed for its relation to the then-popular genres of the chase film, the railroad film and the crime film; at that time, there was no recognised genre known as the western into which to categorise it.
