1968's Hand Catching Lead was Serra's first film. Serra claims it was an attempt to break into the "intimidating" medium of film, inspired by the "great freedom" he saw expressed in Warhol's work and the "tentative, experimental" nature of films like Yvonne Rainer's Hand Movie and Line.
He was originally asked to document the making of his sculpture, House of Cards, in which huge sheets of lead are balanced against one another, held up by their own weight, but decied that a traditional documentary would not be able to capture the creative process. Instead, the work is a "filmic analogy" of the construction of the sculpture: his catching of the pieces of lead is a more refined representation of months spent lugging blocks of lead around his attic with Philip Glass.
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