Constructing the Auteur Brand: A Discursive Perspective on Personal Branding, Public Persona, and Symbolic Capital in the Case of Martin Scorsese

This paper examines how recognisable artistic authorship becomes durable cultural authority through the interaction of artistic production, public communication, discursive positioning, and institutional legitimation. Martin Scorsese offers an information-rich longitudinal case for developing a communication-centred, process-oriented account of auteur branding that extends classical auteur theory and human brand research on film directors. The study adopts a qualitative embedded single-case design drawing on three corpora: ten purposively selected feature films, public communication material analysed through qualitative content and focused discourse–narrative analysis, and 124 institutional records of professional, critical, academic, and cultural recognition. Cross-source analysis identifies an auteur identity traceable through recurring patterns of style, theme, symbolism, narrative, and collaboration. Public communication extends this identity into the roles of filmmaker, cinephile, educator, preservation advocate, and cultural commentator, articulated through autobiographical narration, evaluative stance, lexical–semantic repertoires, and intertextual positioning. Congruence among artistic production, biography, articulated values, and professional activity is treated as an empirically observable condition that may support perceived authenticity; audience reception was not examined. Institutional recognition legitimates artistic and professional authority and cumulatively contributes to symbolic capital. The proposed Auteur Branding Model, an exploratory process model, treats these dimensions as interdependent and recursive, proposing how sustained authorship becomes socially recognised cultural authority.