The Camera Eye Respone

The Camera Eye is a somewhat difficult read, especially for someone like me who is altogether unfamiliar with camera work. Aside from the basics clicking of a button, I don't know how to use a camera, and therefore the field of photography and film is very foreign to me. However, I think the point that the author made about the "absolute realism" of motion pictures being a myth is spot on--I had not noticed before, but after reading the article I understand that what we see on screen is highly fabricated. Scenes are sped up, slowed down, filtered, brightened, darkened, and consequently what we see is not real at all. It is, instead, a creation of an artist, a person praised throughout the article that "leaps the fence at night, scatters his seeds among the cabbages..." As the writer points out, the idea of people flinching or retreating at the sight of rocks falling or a train speeding towards a lens projected before them is a novelty, something that was done only in the early days of cinema. At the end of the article, the author says the "absolute realism" is unrealized, "therefore potential," magic. Because you cannot achieve absolute realism yet with a camera, it leaves room for so much potential creation, the camera limited only by the artist himself.