Cinema is objectivity in time. (Basin 14)
It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection of a damp sidewalk, there a gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, the spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist. (Bazin 15)
[The early filmmakers] saw cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief (Bazin 20)
In the realm of language and style cinematic creation is in direct ratio to fidelity. (Bazin 67)
Bazin sees cinema as documentary; cinema's standard of quality is how well it recreates bare reality, how well it effectively shows exactly what is there and allows that reality to speak for itself. How on earth can this man look past the blaring subjectivity of cinema, though? The monstrous perspective blaring my obvious by the presence of a beginning and end and not to mention a frame? No perspective is objective, and that's what a shot is, a perspective.
Cinema [is] a dramaturgy of Nature. (Bazin 110)
We would define "realist," then, all narrative means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen. (Bazin "Part 2" 27)
To Bazin, the subject of cinema isn't man, it's Nature. Man can take a central position in this subject; however, he is not its only constituent element. And because Nature is the primary subject, fidelity to it is essential for quality cinema. The subject must be portrayed in its actuality, not fragmented and in conflict with itself in order to give rise to abstract emotions and ideas.
The most realistic of the arts shares the common lot. It cannot make reality entirely its own because reality must inevitably elude it at some point. (Bazin "part 2" 29)
Hah! It looks like even Bazin, though, came--in his later essays--to acknowledge the impossibility of art to capture purely objective reality. It is an impossibility.