Standing ovations have become a must at film festivals (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)
With a quite frankly crazy near-20-minute incident, things may have gotten a little out of hand at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
But every year we do it, without fail, even though fans and critics moan about it and it’s quite clearly a reductive way of measuring a movie’s impact.
However, we simply just can’t seem to help ourselves in timing and then reporting on the length of standing ovations at prestigious film festivals.
This year film fans around the world were obsessing over the eight, nine, 10-minute-long Cannes standing ovations for the likes of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, young Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice and Horizon: An American Saga.
And as Venice begins to wrap up for another year, people’s enthusiasm appears to know no bounds with a 13-minute ovation for critics’ darling The Brutalist, a whopping 17 to 18 minutes and 36 seconds (depending on whose stopwatch you go by) for Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door – and even 11 minutes for Joker: Folie à Deux, despite its decidedly mixed reviews.
It’s the biggest con in cinema-going, but each festival (with Venice appearing to give usual biggest proponent Cannes a run for its money this year) every major film being shown has it’s rapturous (or sometimes, just polite) applause monitored from its premiere.
Cannes Film Festival has become known for its standing ovations and how generously they are given out at each of the event’s premieres (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)
Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door received nearly 20 minutes of applause (Picture: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Even if you’ve never been in Cannes’ 2,000-plus-seater Grand Théâtre Lumière on the Croisette, where each premiere is held after the stars and filmmakers ascend those famous, red-carpeted stairs, or among the slightly more intimate 1,032 seats of the Sala Grande at Venice it must seem a slightly odd if not antiquated measure of success.
True, applause is both welcome and expected as a traditional measure of appreciation – but to predict a film’s entire box office run and reception from a wide audience on this one screening alone, usually ranking them in duration order like an Oscars haul? Bizarre.
And as anyone can tell you who has been there as it happens… it’s totally meaningless.
Source:: Metro
