The master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro has described cinema as “writing with light,” a description I’ve always found — dare I say it? — illuminating. I love that when you watch a movie with a projector, whether you’re in a cinema or someone’s living room, you can accidentally interrupt the picture with your body if it blocks the light. I love that the image can change based on the quality of the light shining through the film or the screen. There’s something wonderfully physical and ephemeral about the experience that even the shift to digital movies hasn’t altogether eradicated.

Storaro and I probably both owe some debt to Loie Fuller, the pioneering American performer who is the subject of Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum’s new documentary, “Obsessed With Light” (in theaters). Apparently we’re not the only ones. The film argues that Fuller (1862-1928) was one of the most influential artists of the modern era. Onscreen interviewees and quotes from luminaries (like Taylor Swift) make the case that things we take for granted now — copyrights for artists, or body positivity, or the entire field of modern dance — all exist thanks to Fuller’s forward-thinking, wildly inventive life.

She was both the very famous star of Paris’s Folies Bergère and an icon of the Art Nouveau movement, with an eye toward the possibilities abstraction held for dance. She spent her career constantly innovating, and much of what she did was copied and evolved by those who admired her work. Part of the film follows contemporary dancers, who are influenced by and reclaiming her legacy, too, bolstering the case for her relevance.

Fuller’s signature creation might be the serpentine dance, which combined flowing choreography borrowed from “skirt dancing” with silks and lighting to create the impression of waves and whirling. Very early films by Georges Méliès, the Lumière brothers and Alice Guy Blaché featured Fuller’s serpentine dance.

Some of that footage — among the first to be hand-colored — makes its way into “Obsessed With Light,” and it’s the best part of the film. When Fuller decides to experiment with radium onstage, we see the beautiful (and, of course, dangerous) results, too. All of those clips are mesmerizing and alluring and haunting, as if we’re actually looking at invisible spirits or fairies captured unawares.

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