The Library of Congress Classification system places film and media in the PN call number range. Most books on film and performance will be found in the PNs which is the section for "literary drama."
CLIO is the online catalog to Columbia University Libraries (including Barnard), but excluding Teacher's College and the Law Library who maintain their own catalogs. CLIO contains over 7 million records for books, online resources, journals & newspapers, conference proceedings, sound recordings & scores, videos, archival collections & oral history transcripts, online databases, maps & images, and more!
While searching for a specific film title can help find books about that film, not all relevant books may be indexed in such a way. For example, in a book about Silent Film, you may find a chapter on Buster Keaton, but his name may not otherwise appear in the CLIO record.
Searching by subject heading allows you to find a greater number of relevant books. The links here lead to CLIO, but many of these phrases will also work in databases. You can also combine these subject headings with other keywords in CLIO's advanced search (e.g., adding "Latin America" or "History" or "criticism") to narrow your search.
Relevant subject headings include: