NEW YORK—Making its North American premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York is a documentary about Richard Serra, if not the world’s preeminent living sculptor, then certainly the most monumental.

Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet, directed by the German filmmaker and art historian Maria Anna Tappeiner, who is also the creator of documentaries on William Kentridge, Gary Hill, Matthew Barney, and Sophie Calle, follows the production of the artist’s $20 million Guggenheim Bilbao commission The Matter of Time, installed indefinitely in 2005. Co-produced by two German television networks that year, the 94-minute doc juxtaposes behind-the-scenes footage of the works’ production with lavish photography of Serra’s monumental installations worldwide (though the sites, frustratingly, are unspecified) and extensive interviews with the 68-year-old artist about growing up as a first-generation American, bringing sculpture “off the pedestal,” and how “matter imposes form on form.”

Serra’s brainy physics-speak — torques and ellipses and toruses?!? — may grate on some viewers after a while, particularly since few of the terms are adequately explained for the uninitiated. But the documentation of the works’ production, carried out mostly in a steel mill in Siegen, Germany, is a fascinating look into the byzantine process that occurs between conception and exhibition, from the molding and shaping of 40-ton steel slabs into graceful cones and spirals, to their transportation double-wide style on European highways, to their grueling, high-stakes installation in galleries not necessarily conceived to bear their immense weight.

Serra’s associates, particularly Ernst Fuchs, his longtime rigger, portray him as an exacting theorist and idealist who believes in — indeed, insists on — the feasibility of his increasingly implausible-seeming and labor-intensive vision, seen perhaps most vividly in such jaw-dropping installations as Charlie Brown, a 60-foot plate of steel installed vertically in the Gap headquarters in San Francisco (though skittish viewers might question the wisdom of installing such a precarious-looking work in a glass-fronted structure in the middle of earthquake country).

Still the results, achieved — as the documentary shows — through endless theorization, calculation, and man hours, are a testament to Serra’s tenacity: While the film is playing for only a few weeks, the 1,208-ton Bilbao installation, a stunning playground of graceful, gravity-defying forms, is there to stay.