I finally watched Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive last night, and I’ll write more about the film later, but for now I want to talk about the wall of portraits of Adam’s “heroes” on the wall in his house in Detroit. I paused the movie a few times while Eve is looking at the portraits, and my girlfriend and I identified as many people as we could, and then after the movie was over I went back and grabbed screen captures of all of them. I’ve jotted down the ones I could identify myself; about half of them (below). (Marlowe is another story; I didn’t recognize him but Eve names him when she’s looking at his portrait.) I’d love to figure out who all of these people are! (See UPDATE below; looks like we’ve got all of them!) Please leave a comment below if you want to help, and I’ll update this post with your additions. Also, I should mention, there’s certainly a chance I’ve gotten some of these wrong, so please let me know!

Below is the full wall of portraits, which I stitched together in Photoshop. Click to see it at full size. You may need to click a second time to make your browser display it at 100% size.

The next three images are the same huge image, broken up into three smaller parts. Click to see them at full size.

The next five images are the various closeups of the portraits that we see briefly in the film. Click to see the full-size images.

UPDATE: After a few weeks of work, we’ve got just about all of them, or maybe all of them! I’ve located as many of the actual images on Google image search as possible. The ones marked with a * are ones where I was unable to locate the exact portrait that’s on the wall, but I’m very confident we’ve correctly identified them; if you can find any of the exact portraits I’d love to update these!



1. Joe Strummer



2. Johann Sebastian Bach



3. Claire Denis



4. Mary Wollstonecraft



5. Aki Kaurismäki



6. Bo Diddley*



7. Franz Schubert



8. Chrissie Hynde



9. Franz Kafka



10. Edgar Allen Poe



11. Bruce Lee



12. RZA* – Appeared in Jarmusch’s films Coffee and Cigarettes and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.



13. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Screamin’ Jay appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train.



14. Gustav Mahler



15. Henry Purcell



16. Tom Waits – Tom Waits did the music for Jim Jarmusch’s film Night on Earth, and he appeared in a couple of Jarmusch’s other films (including Coffee and Cigarettes, in a scene with Iggy Pop, who’s also featured on Adam’s wall). Waits and Jarmusch are founding members of The Sons of Lee Marvin. Of course, while we’re on the subject of vampire movies, Tom Waits also played Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.



17. Charles Baudelaire – Note to self, remember to post about the huge bat-shaped monument to Baudelaire in Paris’ Montparnasse Cemetery.



18. Luis Buñuel



19. William S. Burroughs*



20. Sitting Bull



21. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning



22. Robert Johnson



23. Buster Keaton*



24. Nikola Tesla



25. Rumi – Jim Jarmusch mentions Rumi in this interview about Only Lovers Left Alive.



26. William Blake – Interestingly, Johnny Depp’s character in Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man was named William Blake (unrelated to the poet), and the film has a few references to the real Blake’s poetry.



27. Arthur Rimbaud



28. Hedy Lamarr



29. Patti Smith



30. Charley Patton



31. Emily Dickinson



32. Jean-Michel Basquiat – Of course, Jeffrey Wright, who appears in Only Lovers Left Alive as well as Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers, played Jean-Michel Basquiat in the film Basquiat.



33. Robby Müller* – Cinematographer for Jim Jarmusch’s films Down by Law, Mystery Train, Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and the “Twins” segment of Coffee and Cigarettes.



34. John Coltrane



35. Mark Twain



36. Isaac Newton



37. Marcel Duchamp



38. Fritz Lang



39. Naomi Klein*



40. Frank Zappa



41. Iggy Pop* – Appears in Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, as well as Coffee and Cigarettes (in a scene with Tom Waits, who’s also featured on Adam’s wall). According to IMDB, Jim Jarmusch is currently working on a documentary about Iggy and the Stooges.



42. Thelonious Monk



43. Harpo Marx



44. Susan Sontag



45. Black Elk



46. Rodney Dangerfield*



47. Christopher Marlowe*



48. Geronimo



49. Samuel Beckett



50. Jane Austen



51. John Keats



52. Oscar Wilde



53. Jimi Hendrix



54. Nicholas Ray*



55. Hank Williams



56. Billie Holiday



57. Neil Young – Neil Young did the music for Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, and Jarmusch also did a concert documentary about Neil Young and Crazy Horse called Year of the Horse.

Indirectly related reading: If you like poring over screen captures of beautifully-filmed things, check out my posts about all of Hannibal’s suits from the tv series Hannibal — season one and season two.