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Sitting attentively in cinema-like rows the potted audience basks in an electric version of Italian sunshine

NEW YORK (AFP) - From "Avatar" to "Lord of the Rings" plants are no strangers to playing big movie roles, but no one's ever shot a film the plants themselves can watch. Until now.

In a New York art gallery, seven house plants have spent the last seven weeks watching "Strange Skies," probably the first travel documentary for a vegetable audience.

The movie by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats consists of idyllic Italian skies recorded over a two-month period and condensed into a six-minute dawn-to-dawn span.

Sitting attentively in cinema-like rows -- a majesty palm partially blocking the view of rubber plants behind -- the potted audience basks in an electric version of Italian sunshine.

Keats -- who previously used footage of bees pollinating flowers to make pornography for plants -- says an aspiring film maker can't compete with the likes of "Avatar" director James Cameron.

"But then I realized there's a much larger audience -- there are many more plants than people -- that were not being serviced," he said. "I wanted basically to provide plants with what companies such as Disney or MGM provide humans."

In the film, projected onto a fluttering white cloth, clear dawn gives way to high cirrus, the occasional airplane trail, a fleeting cameo fly-by of a bird, then dusk.

At night, beams from a romantic quarter moon hit the trunk of one of the ficus trees.

The movie has no sound and the plants, of course, do not applaud. Other than an alarming loss of leaves among the ficuses there is no discernible reaction.

But Stephen Squibb, a fellow at the AC Institute, which hosted the installation in a Chelsea gallery, said these viewers are unusually riveted: photosynthesis, or the process of turning light into energy, means the movie keeps them alive.

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Clear dawn gives way to high cirrus, the occasional airplane trail, a fleeting cameo fly-by of a bird, then dusk.

"This is how they eat," Squibb said. The New York natives even get a taste of Italy. "They're literally changing their diet."

Keats sees lessons for visiting humans, who can survey the scene from two minimalist white benches.

"Clearly this is an imperfect representation of place and that's for me part of what the work deals with. How do we experience the world and how reliable is it?" he asked. "So much of the world we get on screens. By watching the plants watching the sky there's something a bit sad and sordid."

One visitor, artist Rob Tarbell, enjoyed seeing plants center stage.

"It's good to see a respectful inclusion of something live, capitalizing on what they benefit from rather than having any aspect of cruelty or a freak show," Tarbell said.

Another visitor, photographer Abbas Ebrahimi, also expressed admiration for the green audience. "Plants are better than us. We die and go, while in spring they come back each time."

But after contemplating the installation for a few minutes, he declared: "It doesn't mean anything to me at all. It's just trees and light."

"For some people it might mean something. Maybe if they smoke grass," he allowed.

Keats, currently doing a residency at upstate New York's Yaddo artist colony, is intent on furthering his exploration of plant sensibilities. He plans a "restaurant for plants" at a California museum.

Before that he's turning to another overlooked population -- bacteria.

He hopes to create educational textbooks teaching general relativity and quantum mechanics to the micro organisms in "easy-to-digest doses of amino acid and glucose."

"I figure these books should be beneficial to both microbes and humans: by providing bacteria with a good education, we'll be able to improve their quality of life, and to discourage them from becoming pathogens."

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The exhibition of around 300 models as well as documents and films retraces Saint Laurent's career

PARIS (AFP) - Many young women think of Yves Saint Laurent as a brand, but few know anything of the designer behind the iconic clothes, says Farid Chenoune, one of the curators of the first major retrospective in 27 years devoted to the fashion genius who died in 2008.

One of the missions of the exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris is to explain the designer's importance to a whole generation of women who have taken wearing trousers for granted.

One exhibit is a pants suit ordered from Saint Laurent in 1968 by the American socialite Nan Kempner. "The doorman at a New York restaurant wouldn't let her in because the dress code barred women wearing trousers. So she calmly took off the pants and went in just wearing the jacket as a mini dress."

The exhibition of around 300 models as well as documents and films retraces Saint Laurent's career, spanning 40 years, from his ground-breaking first collection for Christian Dior in 1958, after the founder's untimely death.

Among the earliest works on display are his "trapeze" dresses, which did away with the underpinnings of corsetry, already a decided break with the past.

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Saint Laurent had his share of celebrity customers from Princess Grace of Monaco to Paloma Picasso and Lauren Bacall

He went much further in 1960, borrowing from the beatnik youth culture for his Left Bank collection. It was the first time a biker's blouson had ever been seen on a catwalk, albeit in crocodile. The press was scandalised.

"He was stifled by the rituals of a couture house. He was only 21 when he took over at Dior," explains Chenoune.

By the time he opened his own house in 1962, he had already come up with a blueprint for a modern woman's wardrobe built round the trouser suit, the safari jacket and the reefer jacket.

The show gives over a whole room to these three essentials, showing how they evolved over the years.

"His concept was that women look more feminine in a male outfit. At the same time it gives them more power and a new sensuality."

Saint Laurent was always concerned with designing functional clothes for working women, Chenoune notes, pointing to a photo of the actress Charlotte Rampling in a Prince of Wales check trouser suit with her hands thrust in her pockets. "It's liberating. Pockets are a man's handbag."

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The exhibition is open until August 29

Although he once said he was "bored" with dressing millionaires, Saint Laurent had his share of celebrity customers and a close inner circle of female friends, from Princess Grace of Monaco and Wallis Simpson to Paloma Picasso, Lauren Bacall, Diana Vreeland and Loulou de la Falaise.

Their clothes get a room to themselves, as does the notorious 1971 "Occupation" collection, with its bitter wartime associations of French women sleeping with Nazis.

The inclusion of furs for summer, as worn by prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne, was considered particularly vulgar, as vitriolic press reports reproduced on the walls testify. But the show launched the trend for retro, vintage and kitsch, says Chenoune.

Saint Laurent's long-time muse, the actress Catherine Deneuve, has her own wardrobe, with a rail of dresses and rack of shoes, including her costumes from "Belle de Jour", in which she played a bored bourgeoise married woman who turns to part-time work in a brothel.

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Saint Laurent once said he was "bored" with dressing millionaires

A room full of grand red carpet gowns and balldresses has an appropriately decadent backdrop from the ball scene in Visconti's classic film "The Leopard", and a whole wall is covered with variations of Saint Laurent's signature tuxedo dresses for women. "At some point, everything he did was also used in a tuxedo dress," Chenoune says.

Another room groups exotic influences from the Ballets Russes to China, Morocco and Africa and his homage to painters, including Mondrian, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso.

There is also the complete set of pictures from the photo shoot the designer did in the nude to launch the house's first perfume for men, in which he comes across as a pop icon, a cross between Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe, erotic male beauty and the vulnerability of someone who shared his private life with the public, Chenoune says.

"It was also a turning point for glasses. They suddenly became a sexy accessory."

The exhibition is open until August 29.