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Like most of Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work, Goodbye to Language (or Adieu au Langage) is an experimental essay film, but it is the first time he’s shot an entire feature in 3-D.

As always, Godard challenges not only his audience but modern conventions of filmmaking. Many of his earliest innovations from the 1960s have become commonplace in film and media. For example, Godard pioneered techniques like the jump cut: the visual equivalent of a record skipping through time, it’s now a common feature of every other television commercial or music video.

Godard hasn’t made a widely-distributed, commercial film in years, but his experimental work continues to garner praise with Goodbye to Language 3D possibly being one of his most acclaimed films. Though its use of 3D is surprising and unprecendented, many of its admirers concede that the film is very difficult to understand. It’s about as challenging as it is personal and abstract.

Celebrated film scholar David Bordwell shared his thoughts on Goodbye to Language in a recent interview with NPR, explaining “I think what [Godard is] talking about — and this is one of the reasons the dog Roxy is very prominent in the film — is that he’s trying to get people to look at the world in a kind of an unspoiled way. There are hints throughout the film that animal consciousness is kind of closer to the world than we are, that language sets up a barrier or filter or screen between us and what’s really there. And although the film is full of language, talk, printed text and so on, nevertheless I think there’s a sense he wants the viewer to scrape away a lot of the ordinary conceptions we have about how we communicate and look at the world afresh.”