“Pascale Ogier was full of the magic of the moment,” wrote Olivier Assayas. “She was and always will be an icon.” When Ogier died in October 1984 at only 25 years old, she had become a sensation both onscreen and off. Watching her four decades later, it isn’t hard to understand why. Plugged into the material-girl fads of the ‘80s—backcombed hair, big headphones—Ogier had an impossible vitality that remade current crazes into irresistible style. On Paris streets, she was an inspiration. To French cineastes including Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohmer, she embodied a post-’68 generation; Ogier switched them both on to what was modern, what was new.

When she first appears in Radio-Serpent (1980), a fashionably fluorescent short by experimental filmmaker Unglee, she seems indifferent to the camera—though the camera is taken with her, a girl with two tiny film credits at that time. Excitable close-ups throughout the film gather iconic details: aqua-blue eyes, hypnotically heavy eyelids. Along with a cigarette and a gun, her silver-studded wristbands tease toughness. She reprises that punk persona in Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981), this time kickstarting the action as a biker—all denim, leather, and attitude. Wielding an amateur background in martial arts during some sequences, Ogier quests here alongside her mother, Bulle, in what Serge Daney conspicuously called “the first film” of the ’80s.

Pascale and Bulle co-wrote that labyrinthine film with Rivette, and the younger Ogier later added another patterned ribbon to her bow when she designed the sets of Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris (1984). Winning the prize for best actress at the Venice Film Festival, her high-spiritedness pops throughout the film, fizzing next to the bright Mondrian squares with which she decorated it. More, then, than just an actor, Ogier was unstoppably creative. Even when she died, Marguerite Duras mused that she lived on. Nothing could counter the strange feeling of Ogier’s expressive energy reverberating through Paris; Paris still belonged to her.