Which is a more powerful statement? This: http://virgo.bibl.u-szeged.hu/wm/paint/auth/monet/parliament...
or this: http://isitthattime.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/fog-over-the...
There's no question that the latter is more technically accurate, more lifelike, more realistic, but it lacks the guttural punch of the Monet. Monet was a master, but only by exploiting the limitations of his medium could he attain that mastery.
So it goes with film. A decent cinematographer uses the inherent faults of film to convey emotion. Without the low dynamic range of film, the dark corners of the Nostromo in Alien would have looked like a plywood movie set. Without lens flare and blown highlights then the plight of a dehydrated hero in the desert would be much harder to get across. Those things - 24fps, lens flare, low range, depth of field - have become part of our shared culture now. So much so that even media which aim for perfect realism (eg video games) mimic some of them to aid immersion and, once again, heighten the emotional response.
If 24fps is somehow good for certain types of film, then by all means, keep using it. But it's silly to say that 24fps is universally better, as I've heard some people say.
You point is well taken, but just as a minor nit, I wanted to add that artists did achieve photorealism first and then move on to abstractness. Arguably, that was driven by the advent of photography which commoditized photorealism.
But still, painting is painting. Take the Dutch Old Masters: incredibly realistic, lifelike pictures, but also extraordinarily powerful. One doesn't preclude the other, but in every case something about the medium contributes to its power. It might be the fact that a sitter for one of Caravaggio's Christs was actually suffering due to holding his body in place for so long; it could be a need to invent some aspect of light in a scene which ends up illuminating a girl's face in a particularly lovely way.
There's plenty of emotion in photography, too, but it tends to come as a result of skilful use of that medium's own characteristics: spontaneity, completeness, and presence. Press photographs are a great example, exploiting the medium's immediacy to steal a few, shocking milliseconds of reality. That applies even to powerful landscape photographs, in the opposite way: They are very carefully staged, manipulated and contrived, all simply a way to align the limitations of the medium (only 1/500th of a second to make an image) with a particularly beautiful instant of passing space-time.
The first one made me think of cartoon depictions of the evil lair and children's drawings. It also looked like those ink blob psychological tests were you can see anything you want in the picture. (Which is presumably why you like it better.)
To me some arguments for film hold up, but are rapidly becoming less relevant as digital sensors improve. The biggest case form film to me is the dynamic range (in film terms "latitude") compared to digital. Film is currently still better at retaining detail in high contrast shots (for example a person dimly lit against a bright sky). And when film does "blow out" it has a tendency to be a smooth curve and even the over-exposed parts of the frame that may be fully white still have some texture. Whereas digital has a harsh drop off where the information is just gone and it has a rather ugly look.
Newer camera sensors are starting to get very, very close to film in terms of latitude. But for the moment even the most expensive Hollywood level cameras are not quite as good. I expect this to change and eventually film won't have this advantage anymore.
Film does tend to have a pleasing, organic look. But plugins are getting very good at emulating the good parts of that without all of the hassles of film. I liken it to audio recording, which went through a similar analog-vs-digital revolution in the 90's. there are still people that choose analog for artistic reasons, but digital is accepted as the primary recording medium now.
As for 48fps, though, that's irrelevant in the digital-vs-film argument because both types of cameras can shoot at either frame rate.
I only have problems with weird arguments where people prefer stuff that's obviously worse, like the aforementioned grain and low frame rates.
Of course the correlation between certain types of noise/distortion and the resulting interpretation is in many cases culturally determined, and that changes over time... One minute shakycam is considered the height of immersion, the next, it's an embarrassing affectation.
But still, there's nothing inherently wrong with preferring something "worse," especially when the latter judgment is made on a narrow technical basis which misses the larger picture.
Film has a charm to itself though (even just watching rushes projectioned vs monitor), but from a practical standpoint it's dead and gone. When you factor in a cost of stock only for a 90 minute film (with a, standard, coverage of 20:1 or 30:!) you have to pay for it as much as a new digital camera. Not to mention developing, scanning, handling, storing it...
I think it's a pretty exciting time actually in camera technology. I think film will still be an artistic choice for a while. Directors like Spielberg and Tarantino have claimed they will never stop shooting on film. But, I heard that same kind of stuff about audio back in the 90s, so we'll see!
I'm also one of those guys waiting on my pre-order of a black magic cinema camera which claims 13 stops, so I'm pretty excited to get my hands on it!
I love digital, I love film. I'd like directors to have a choice, but I suspect we'll see studios effectively enforcing digital for all but the most influential directors going forward.