The variables of digital are entirely different and will never reproduce the beauty of an organic/analog medium. This is why most digitally graded movies look fake, even those that are shot on actual celluloid film. The digital grading never feels “natural” to my eyes. It feels “tacked on.” Digital footages in addition to digital grading has robbed the life from films. Both give an image a very synthetic, sterile and flat look. It does not feel lively or natural. because it is “not” natural.
You can get close, but that’s it.
While I totally understand your faible for film material, this statement luckily neither holds true technically nor mathematically, especially not in that generalisation which quite sound like the praise of vinyl to me whose alledged superiority to decent PCM doesn’t withstand any serious scientific comparison either.
A common misconception amongst most people is that something being digital means harm per se while in fact interpreting information digitally doesn’t make it better or worse - it’s just a different way of expression.
Another one is the false assumption that any analog signal would be perfect compared to the oh so evil digital ones. Digitalisation and reconstruction introduce errors and thus digital systems aren’t perfect considering the limited sample rate and word lengths by definition - but neither are analog systems to start with.
There are certain proven (but sadly mostly misunderstood) facts about how to digitalise analog signals and how to reconstruct them, the errors involved and the limitations depending on the desired noise floor or bandwidth.
Having written that, it doesn’t mean that even nowadays electronic cameras or digital based postproduction tools don’t have flaws but this is not due to the fact that digital data is processed as it could be theoretically infinitely precise depending on the effort one wants to take. And if an electronic camera looks “digital”, it’s because something within the analog parts like the CCD went wrong from the start. Digitalising stuff “only” limits two parameters: bandwidth and SNR according to Nyquist and Shannon.
And speaking about naturalism: the human DNA can be considered to be digital as well, so in fact something being digital is counterintuitively very natural.