Broadcast in 1999 on the Buddhist programme France 2 has carried for decades, this hour-long documentary by Patrick Chiuzzi is the fullest television treatment of Taisen Deshimaru's life and work. Chiuzzi is a French documentary director and producer who founded his own production company in 1986, and the film carries the unhurried pace of that tradition: long takes of temple corridors and winter light, lines of Japanese poetry laid over the images as subtitles, and no hurry to explain.
The story it tells begins in July 1967. When Deshimaru arrived in France there was no dojo. There was no practice of Zen at all. There were intellectuals who were interested in Zen because of books they had read, a scene fed by translations, koan anthologies and the Beat enthusiasm that had crossed from America. Into this, a fifty-two-year-old Japanese man arrived speaking almost no French, with no institutional backing and no congregation waiting for him.
What he did on arrival became the founding anecdote of European Zen. In a conference room, faced with an audience expecting a lecture, he climbed onto a table, sat down and said that Zen is only zazen. Nothing else. It impressed everyone in the room, and it set the terms for the fifteen years that followed. Everything he built afterwards, the Paris dojo, the Association Zen Internationale, the temple at La Gendronnière, the long summer sesshins, rested on that single refusal to let Zen become a subject of conversation.
The film was made seventeen years after his death in 1982, so it works from archive material, and that turns out to be its strength. The footage catches his manner as no reconstruction could: the blunt French, the abrupt changes of register, the laughter, the impatience with anyone trying to settle a question in words rather than posture. Nothing is smoothed out, including his English, which he used freely and wrecked cheerfully.
One line from the film has become widely quoted, and it shows why he was hard to categorise. He says he wants to help God, that he wants the true God to come back, that God right now is down, down, down, and that God is tired. It is not a statement any theologian would sign, and it is not Buddhist doctrine either. It is Deshimaru doing what he always did: taking a word his audience thought they understood and putting it somewhere uncomfortable, so that the listener has to look again at what they believed they meant by it.
For anyone trying to understand how Zen became an established European practice rather than an intellectual fashion, this is the single most useful video on the site. It gives the full arc in one sitting, from a man on a table in a conference room to a lineage with dojos across the continent. Viewers who want his teaching in the room should go to the mondo recordings; those who want to see the monastic world he came from should start with the 1971 Desjardins films. This one explains how the two connect.