The Digital Passion of Resolution

I felt compelled to rent and watch Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc after reading everyone's comments and Deleuze's references to it and it was fun to feel the close-ups in a new way. It's great how Dreyer lets the subtleties of expression run the full course of their complexities as they cross the actors' faces like slow motion lightning forcing a retracing of the rethinking of the sequence that has just transpired. It's 1928 and it shows... Silent film has fully developed its story-telling potential and is now ready to go beyond the action-image. It's now ready to accept the dimension of the "internal", except that it gets hijacked by sound for another 20 years. Dreyer's Joan of Arc seems to go that extra push into the inside by giving time to allow the full modulation of feeling on each face as expression of feeling-thought in motion. And even if we can't see the forces that generate the thought, we can definitely see the results as cues as to how to read and summarize what precedes it while colouring our intuition and expectations as to that which is coming. We could call the beautiful b&w images hyper-real due to the overall look of the film created by superior optics, incredible amounts of light, a super-fine grain stock, the filtration of the light to offer preferential treatment to select parts of the light spectrum during shooting and the colour palette used in the art-direction to keep everything within grey midtones. But in contrast to the hyper-reality of HD TV, I wonder if the heightened sense of reality and the crispness of the resolution of the image in HD is not because there is more but because there is less, a "subtraction" of sorts, the contrast between the fine-grain resolution of the retina vs. the fine coarseness (or the coarse fineness?) of the HD chips. What I mean by this is a sampling/representation that lacks continuity in the spectrum of representation (or a too coarse a sampling to define the spectrum of presentation) and we feel that it is hyper-real because there is not as much fuzziness to figure out in the making sense of the image. We feel the choppiness of digital sampling as crispness and the smooth continuity of the analog as fuzzy and out of focus. The "fattiness" of listening to vinyl is so much more satisfying than the lack of presence and dry crispness of a CD and as Brian Massumi says it's perhaps because fat (gras) indiscriminately affects all your taste buds--it provides broad-band satisfaction to the full-spectrum resolution of your (gustatory) sensoria. Perhaps the sensorial pleasure of roundness and smoothness of film lies in the continuous full-spectrum depth and complexity of the analog? Perhaps we are being sold on the super-crispness of the digital as a positive when in fact it is a negative and a shortcoming dictated by the imperatives or limitations of the technology and their marketing strategies? 0 or 1 vs 0>x<1? Bonjour Zeno, comment tu vas?