Last hurrah: have standing ovations gone too far?

If standing and clapping for more than 15 minutes sounds a bit tiring then you might want to steer clear of film festivals, where standing ovations are becoming increasingly epic affairs.

The Venice International Film Festival premiere of Pedro Almodóvar's "The Room Next Door" recently received 17 minutes of applause, a fact widely reported in the show business media, where the "standing-o-meter" is now a staple in some arts publications such as Vulture.

'People be clappin''

The "escalation" of ovations suggests that media coverage of the subject "only encourages longer ovations as the festival wears on", said The Guardian. But "mostly", the length of ovations means "nothing at all regarding a film's long-term prospects".

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For instance, the 2012 thriller "The Paperboy" enjoyed a "vigorous" 15-minute ovation at its Cannes premiere after having been "roundly booed at its press screening earlier that day". It was rumoured that the film's publicists, "rattled by the critical drubbing", planted "ringers" at the premiere to "keep the applause going for as long as possible".

Similarly, said Vulture, "Horizon: an American Saga" received an 11-minute standing ovation, but the film "went on to bomb at the box office".

But the "timing of clapping at festivals" like Venice and Cannes has still become an "entertainment-news fixture". The length of the ovation after each major premiere gets "its own headline" in trade papers such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. "People be clappin', and reporters be trackin' said clappin'," as Vulture put it.

At this rate it might not be long until "ice-cream vendors" garner "some form of standing ovation", said Screen Daily. Why are things going this way? "Some point to the effects of the pandemic", and also cite "a deeper, post-Covid appreciation for the communal experience of cinemagoing", while others are "beginning to draw a connection to heightened media coverage of world premiere screenings".

All of this means an ovation under five minutes is "now seen, more or less, as outrageous slander", said GQ. Sometimes a "curtailed ovation" is a "polite way" for the audience members to "deliver a collective 'meh' verdict on what they've just seen", said The Guardian, and this means no ovation at all is "close to unthinkable".

'Ovation-itis'

"Adulation across the arts is hardly revelatory," said Screen Rant. The Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti received 165 curtain calls and 67 minutes of applause after a 1988 performance in Berlin. "Much to the horror" of London theatre critics, audiences "jumped to their feet" after every song by Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger in last year's "Sunset Boulevard" revival.

Just "a few years ago", a theatre audience "getting to its feet was a once-in-a-generation achievement". But now audience members "seem to think it's their duty", said Fiona Mountford on the i news site. "Ovation-itis" has been imported from the US and is "now running riot through our theatres".

Default ovations have their critics across the pond, too. They are "weird and clumsy" and also "fake" and "crude", said John McWhorter in The New York Times. But he suspects that the trend "is with us to stay".

You might think that performers, at least, appreciate more ovations, but Skip Maloney isn't so sure. Writing on OnStage Blog, Maloney said that the sincerity, or otherwise, of a standing ovation is understood by the performers because they "know better than anyone in the space whether the standing ovation is heartfelt" or not.

If it's "spontaneous and heartfelt", an ovation "feeds back to the stage", but if it's "just people standing to be nice, that feedback loop is severed".