Jean Renoir's barn dance.

For me, one of the most satisfying events of the 1994-95 dance season was viewing a nine-minute scene in a film by Jean Renoir, the centenary of whose birth was being widely celebrated with retrospective screenings. Though the fluidity of his camera work deliberately mirrors the mercurial quality of existence. Renoir hardly counts among Terpsichore's servants; that he once applied his gifts to a barn dance is both accidental and our good fortune.

The most genially humanistic of directors, Renoir started out making charming and eloquent silents. As film technology evolved, he moved on with it to create black-and-white talkies, the masterworks of the thirties that would inspire the nouvelle vague directors two decades later. Finally he worked in color with a lushness that recalls the paintings of his father, Auguste Renoir. Jean Renoir's essential subject was the nature of life, in all its beauty and chaos, and the vagaries of the human heart. He made movies look like life and life look wonderful and, despite its illogic and injustice, its sorrows and catastrophes, like a cause for rejoicing.

In 1939 he emigrated from his native France to the United States, where his first film for the Hollywood studio system (utterly alien to his aesthetic) was an unlikely item called Swamp Water. Released in 1941 by Twentieth Century Fox, it's a western-style genre film of good confronting evil in the alligator-infested Okefenokee boglands of Georgia, complete with the requisite love interest and heavy-duty regional accents. Renoir, bless him, intermittently infused the trite scheme with his radiant imagination, a fact film buffs still marvel at. What concerns the dance fan is a passage in which the character of indigenous social dance is summed up without comment, indeed without seeming intent, but with the genius that permits a swift, instinctive grasp of foreign matter.

In the story that surrounds this moment an upright young fellow earns his manhood by defying the stern, if loving, authority of his father and braving the perilous maze of the swampland.

The wilderness, conventionally supposed to be pure and idyllic in contrast to the corrupt town, turns out to be intrinsically dangerous (with deadly snakes and quicksand in addition to those alligators) as well as the hideout of a presumed murderer. Our hero confronts the accused killer, eventually proves him innocent, and engineers his return to society. In the course of these labors he not only ferrets out and faces down the real culprits but also rids himself of an inappropriate attachment to the town's fickle belle, hitching himself to the suspect's outcast daughter, a wild child with a guileless soul.

Two-thirds of the way through the film, the rural community holds a barn dance. In one sense it's just a convenience, a believable way to gather most of the important characters in the story and push some of their conflicts to a climax. Needless to say, it also reinforces the element of local color. (The sepia tone of the film's original print is a crowning touch.) But if the thrust of the plot is the restoration of justice to a flawed society, the dance underlines this theme of setting things right: It offers a background depicting a traditional manifestation of group harmony, against which the disturbances of individuals in the foreground appear to be mere temporary distractions from a peaceful, joyous interaction that reasserts itself eternally.

As Renoir's camera travels across and through the dancing, with the unaffected grace and assurance of an accomplished performer, we see how the participants represent the world in little. First, perhaps, we notice the rich range of body and facial types and the affecting spectrum of ages that has been assembled. Then we notice the myriad ways in which people can execute the same simple movement: lustily, daintily, buoyantly, or with a chastely restrained indication of step and pattern that is nonetheless effective. We even get to see the audience: clapping and bobbing onlookers rim the space, echoing and thus supporting the fully activated dance at its center.

Renoir shows us, too, how the dance represents codified manners and the human empathy and dignity from which they arise. And he reveals the workings of social structure: twosomes agreeing on a paradigm for romance in a lilting waltz or the group subdividing into couples, changing partners, then joining in an all-inclusive circle according to the cues of the caller in the square dance. Renoir doesn't overlook dance as theater, shooting it now through a window, now through a glass door, whose frames create a provisional proscenium. Nor does he ignore dance as ecstatic utterance, assigning it to the true heroine as the means for expressing her unanticipated joy. But best of all, he trains his and our eyes on "ordinary folks," whose way of dancing reflects the common motions of harsh manual labor and decorous domestic behavior. The rural social dancing that Renoir glorifies so casually and disarmingly is not a highly technical, highly stylized activity distinct from everyday life but, rather, is its natural extension.