A twenty-six-minute television report on Taisen Deshimaru, broadcast on Antenne 2's Sunday news magazine and filmed by Lyse Bloch. It is the earliest kind of document there is on European Zen: not a film made by practitioners for practitioners, but French national television turning up to work out what this Japanese man had started and whether it should be taken seriously.
It opens on snow. A mountain resort, apartment blocks against a white slope, the kind of place that empties between seasons, which is where Deshimaru held his long retreats. Inside, a hall filled with Europeans sitting in rows, facing the wall. A gong is struck. Deshimaru walks the lines with the kyosaku across his forearms. The camera stays close to the faces of the people sitting, and they are ordinary French faces of the period, students and middle-aged women and bearded men in glasses, none of them in any way exotic.
The report follows the whole shape of a retreat. A young man's head shaved under Deshimaru's hand. A ceremony at a candlelit table, hands joined, kesa being received. Sutras read aloud. And then the sequence that anchors the film: Deshimaru at his own desk in Paris, a calligraphy scroll behind him and bookshelves crowded on both sides, explaining, laughing, and at one point holding a single thumb up to the lens. Anyone who has sat zazen knows what that thumb is about.
What lifts the report above a curiosity piece is its second half. Bloch takes the question to French professionals and lets them answer under their own names and titles. Professor Paul Chauchard, a neurophysiologist. Jean Picard, a physiotherapist. Doctor Edgar Schneitzler, a psychiatrist. Jacques Dropsy, a psychologist. And finally, filmed in front of a church, Father Joseph Boishu, a priest. Practitioners speak too, several of them at length, a woman with long dark hair, an older woman, a young man seated beneath a brushed character on the wall.
That line-up is not accidental, and it tracks Deshimaru's own argument precisely. He habitually framed zazen in physiological terms, as something that rebalances a brain split by modern life, and he was never interested in Zen as an exotic import for the curious. Putting a neurophysiologist, a body therapist and a psychiatrist on camera tests that claim on its own ground. Ending with a Catholic priest opens the question the second part of this report takes up, when Deshimaru goes into a Christian monastery and teaches the monks to sit.
For a site visitor, this is the best single introduction to what Zen actually looked like in France in the 1970s. The Desjardins films show the Japanese monastic world Deshimaru came from. The mondo recordings show him teaching. This one shows the reception: a foreign practice being examined, in public, by a country deciding what to make of it.