For its first ever performance in this country, the Symphony Orchestra of India - formed in only 2006 - kicked off its UK tour in spectacular style at Symphony Hall, Birmingham yesterday evening. Based at the National Centre of Performing Arts in Mumbai, the SOI is India’s first and only professional symphony orchestra.

The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard.

Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre.

The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.

German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making some of the classic films of the 1920s and 1930s, but never learnt an Indian language – also brings huge scale to its desert exteriors and crowd scenes, with hordes of camels, and a crucial elephant moment. It provided precedent for the Hindi post-war film industry as a whole, but there’s genuine feeling in the more intimate moments, as well as moments of realism that look forward even to the likes of Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu trilogy .

It all looks more than handsome in this BFI National Archive 4K restoration (there’s a short extra about that process), and the film’s new score from Anoushka Shankar is a treat. It must have been wonderful on the big screen with live ensemble when premiered as the LFF 2017 Archive Gala, but the combination of image and musical accompaniment certainly impresses from disc. Shankar has spoken of combining elements from the film’s 17th century historical setting, its 1920s production era and the present day, with the tastes of the latter dominating. As well as her own sitar – there are transcendent moments that sound so vibrantly alive, and gloriously lyric accompaniment for love scenes – she orchestrates for Indian bamboo flute and percussion elements, amplified at key moments by violin, cello, clarinet and keyboards.       

An early intertitle, “Love, Sorrow - and Fame Immortal”, gives a hint of the action. British scriptwriter WA Burton worked from a treatment of Niranjan Pal’s play about Mumtaz Mahal, consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who commemorated her with Agra's monument to undying love (the Taj Mahal, pictured above). It’s a very free treatment of her life story, beginning with a childhood ambush that sees her brought up by a peasant family, her nobility unsuspected; they name her Selima and treat her as a sister to their son, Shiraz (the film’s producer Himansu Rai plays that role in adulthood, opposite the enchanting Enakshi Rama Rau). Kidnapped by slavers, she arrives in the Emperor’s harem, where the Shah woos her. But Shiraz will always love her: he follows her to the palace, where emotions run freely. His suffering is finally redeemed when, already blind, he enshrines her memory in the Taj Mahal: “not hands but the warmth of a heart built this which stands like a dream.”

The accompanying booklet essays throw fascinating light on the unusual circumstances behind the film, and the context of Indian film-making in the closing decades of the British Raj. Films were aimed simultaneously at the local and international markets (Shiraz was a hit in Europe, but not in the US). Documentary and propaganda was never far away, illustrated by two extras here: Temples of India is a 1938 10-minute travelogue, shot in colour by none other than Jack Cardiff. The 1944 12-minute Musical Instruments of India was a public information film to promote Indian arts and culture, interesting because it didn’t follow more standard wartime lines to emphasise instead the wider cultural achievements of the soon-to-be-independent nation.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Shiraz

Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an injection of reality of political, economic and historical analyses.”

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die.

There are two elephants in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party. One appears literally at the film’s climax, emblazoned with graffiti. More significant, and troubling, is the metaphorical elephant in the room: that we’re invited to laugh at a white comedian in brownface.

Namely Peter Sellers, impersonating an Indian actor who unwittingly wrecks an upmarket Hollywood shindig. His Hrundi V Bakshi is almost a retread of the character he played opposite Sophia Loren in 1960’s The Millionairess. Still, according to a talking head interviewed in one of the bonus features, the film “was very popular in India”. Hmmm. Best just to accept that things were different then, and be glad that such antediluvian attitudes are mostly a thing of the past.

Edwards’ and Sellers’ key influence was surely Jacques Tati

This is a comedy of social embarrassment, about the agonies of not fitting in. A pre-credits sequence shows Bakshi unwittingly sabotaging a historical epic, wearing a modern wristwatch and later blowing up most of the set. Told that he’ll never work again, Bakshi’s name is accidentally added to the guest list of a party held by the studio head. That’s about it plotwise, the scenario allowing for a sequence of elaborate semi-improvised scenes.

Despite the inevitable reservations about Sellers’ accent and appearance, much of what follows is very, very funny: a series of immaculately choreographed mishaps involving footwear, birds, food, wigs and toilet paper. Edwards, reconciled with Sellers after falling out during the making of A Shot in the Dark, used a video camera to immediately review each take, allowing the set pieces to be polished to perfection. And there are some brilliant moments, from an attempt to retrieve a lost shoe to an iconic exchange with a parrot. Birdie num num, anybody?Edwards’ and Sellers’ key influence was surely Jacques Tati (though none of those interviewed in the bonus features admit this): Bakshi arrives at the party in a very Hulot-esque three-wheeler (pictured above), and the elaborate modernist set recalls Mon Oncle and Playtime. There are long stretches where Sellers’ character is on the periphery, and the sound mix often favours background noise over dialogue.

An elderly Edwards recalls that he’d originally wanted to make a film totally free of dialogue. It’s significant that The Party begins to unravel in its more conventional later stages, when Sellers begins to speak more and the semblance of a plot emerges. His Bakshi remains the most likeable character and duly gets the girl, blithely driving away from the party’s wreckage. Watch, and enjoy with a hefty dose of salt. Incidental pleasures include a cheesy Henry Mancini score (the title song featuring some excruciating Don Black lyrics), and the gloriously funky typeface used in the opening credits. The afore-mentioned bonus interviews suggest that all concerned had a groovy time making the film, and the restored image is vibrant.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Party