One thing that stuck out to me from the reading in Barsam's Looking at Movies was his description of a movie's "rhythm". According to him, "An editor can control the rhythm... of a film - the pace at which it moves forward - by varying the duration of the shots" (247). As an avid musical enthusiast I've always thought of how a movie's edited as compared to the tempo of a symphony or the effectiveness of a jazz solo. The pacing of any performance, whether it be purely aural as in the case of an orchestral rendition or as visual as a PowerPoint presentation, is to me an important factor of how effective the performance is as a whole. Casablanca flows differently from Citizen Kane... much more smoothly, much more in a way that feels "right" and ultimately comfortable.

As a matter of fact, in Casablanca, the comfort of the audience is taken almost to an extreme. Take, for instance, the scene where antagonists begin singing a song celebrating their German homeland, and are aggressively matched by the nationalism of France's anthem sung by the overwhelming crowd. In reality, two songs haphazardly rendered at the same time would create musical cacophony, especially given the fact that the performers are nothing more than customers at a local pub. Instead, however, the two songs come together perfectly, both miraculously inhabiting the exact same key and finishing simultaneously. In other words, the diagetic sound was expressively altered in order to prevent distraction from the conflict between the German invaders and the outraged crowd of French civilians. How different from Citizen Kane, where such cacophony was purposely created in a montage of Susan Alexander's disastrous singing career in order to make the audience feel her unhappiness. Perhaps, indeed, that's why Casablanca has always had a larger audience... it takes a special kind of person to willingly tolerate the sort of inward disturbance such movies will never offer.