In Memoriam: Jean Decock

822 In Memoriam: Jean Decock Readers of the French Review have been accustomed to seeing in each year’s February issue a detailed account of the previous year’s Cannes Film Festival. Its author, with his practiced eye and his inimitable style en pointillé managed, year after year, something approaching the impossible: a digest of dozens and dozens of films, an état présent of the medium of cinema in its French and international contexts; wise, often prescient readings of the artistic evolution of an extraordinary number of directors; and, always, his coups de cœur du Festival. Jean Decock left us in January of this year. He was the longest serving film review editor in the journal’s history, in which capacity he worked to make film a regular part of the French Review’s offerings. He built and nurtured the journal’s first true network of film enthusiasts. They were loyal to his rubric and wrote for it with pleasure because they understood he was striving to make the journal a place where film scholarship would be welcome. And for nearly 15 years after he handed the reins over to his successor and “retired,” Jean Decock published regularly on film and on theater. He never missed a review of the Festival, and thanks to him we felt like we were seated in the screening rooms with an immensely knowledgeable and generous companion. He would have appreciated the irony that his passing preceded by mere weeks the appearance of the issue containing his final Cannes review—too late for him to take a curtain call! That is as it should be: the very idea of one would have seemed absurd to this modest, lovely man. But it would have been richly deserved. Skidmore College John Anzalone ...