Until now, the easiest non-bootleg way to hear the early Rolling Stones live was via the various home cinema editions of October 1964’s T.A.M.I. show. Otherwise, although they employed backing tracks for broadcast, the American DVDs of their Ed Sullivan Show appearances caught the band in thrilling full flight.

Laid Bare – it has a lurid implication which is all too suitable for Joe Orton’s work. During a time where the straight-laced British struggled to ease into sexual liberation, Orton stretched acceptability to its very limits. Salacious acts had been going on behind closed doors long before the Sixties, but everyone hid behind a modest front. In his brief career, Orton’s plays challenged this hypocrisy with razor wit and poetic eloquence.

Go west, opera-lover: Mid Wales Opera is back in business. In fact, it’s been back since spring this year, when it toured venues in Wales and England with a warmly reviewed Handel Semele and a striking (and impressively cast) Magic Flute inspired by 1970s British sci-fi. That was the first production under the company’s new artistic leadership of Jonathan Lyness and Richard Studer – a conductor/director team with considerable form and substantial ambitions.

STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura.

In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.

In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.

Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”

They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. It's Netflix’s new series about the FBI in the Seventies, when the Bureau was slowly starting to realise that catching criminals needed more than the old “just the facts, ma’am” approach.

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