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The recent retrospective of Juliet Berto’s acting work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents an artist who occupied the forefront of both formal and ideological reimaginings of the medium during her lifetime. An icon of the French New Wave for her roles in landmark films by Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, she also regularly lent her presence to works of radical leftist filmmaking from directors such as Robert Kramer and Marin Karmitz. Neige, Berto’s 1981 directorial debut made in collaboration with her partner Jean-Henri Roger, bears the influence of these artists and synthesizes them into something entirely its own, a playful and unpretentious work that nonetheless retains a fierce political anger.

The title of the film—which translates to Snow in English—refers to heroin, the drug around which much of the plot revolves. Berto stars as Anita, a bartender in Paris’s racy Pigalle district whose committed...

Vladimir and Rosa.“Cinema contains everything. It joins writing, painting, music. It is the most complete art.”—Juliet Berto, Ciné-Bulles, 19861Juliet Berto burst onto the Parisian film scene in the rich late 60s period of experimentation and radicalization, just as the New Wave diverged into competing streams of political and humanist directors. Her biography (what scant details are publicly available) is mythical, and tragically short: Annie Jamet, born and living in southern France, attends a Grenoble film screening where Jean-Luc Godard is present; the director, captivated by 19-year-old Annie, offers her a role in his film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Annie moved to Paris, and by the end 1967, Juliet Berto (as she is credited onscreen) had appeared in three Godard films, a relationship that would deepen over the course of the radical 60s. Berto then worked with Jacques Rivette during the 70s as a key collaborator and...