Robert Sklar, a film scholar whose 1975 book “Movie-Made America” was one of the first histories to place Hollywood films in a social and political context, finding them a key to understanding how modern American values and beliefs have been shaped, died on Saturday in Barcelona. He was 74.

The cause was a brain injury sustained in a bicycle accident, his son Leonard said.

Mr. Sklar, who was a professor of cinema studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for more than 30 years, came to film in the 1960s, when he was asked to serve as a faculty adviser to the Cinema Guild, the student film society at the University of Michigan, where he taught in the American culture program.

He found the proposal enticing. After publishing a cultural study of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he had begun focusing on Hollywood film as a lens for analyzing American society in the 1920s and 1930s....