The director Bertrand Blier has, over a thirty-year period, come to be acknowledged as one of the most enduring and challenging talents of French post-new wave cinema. This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to identify strategies for finding one's way through a body of work which has disconcerted spectators, critics and academics alike, and to identify some reference points which the curious spectator can use as a map to navigate through Blier's preferred themes and stylistic techniques. It is the very unconventionality of this work that has had such an appeal to emerging film-makers and actors. The analysis reveals that the key tropes around which Blier's work is structured point to an engagement with a tradition of popular discourse. The concept of artistic subversion is absolutely central to understanding Blier's work.