Agreement between Thomas Alva Edison and Marc Klaw, Abraham L. Erlanger, Walter W Freeman and William Harris. Dated April 7th, 1898 (Rutgers. HX98178).

Agreement. Thomas A. Edison and Marc Klaw, Abraham L. Erlanger, Walter W. Freeman, William Harris and Franck Z. Maguire. Dated April 1898

Assignment of copyright. Albert G. Eaves and Richard G. Hollaman to Thomas A. Edison. July 19-1899.

Passion Play Pictures.
An unusually interesting and what promises to be an equally instructive entertainment is announced at the Academy of Music for Thanksgiving week, when W. W. Freeman will exhibit for the first time in this country an exact pictorial reproduction of the Passion Play tableaux. Mr. Freeman spent last summer in the mountains of Horitz with the peasants, who perform this miracle play in the Austrian Alps there, and succeeded in getting some cinematograph pictures of the peasants in their daily avocations and particularly those humble men and women who enact the principal parts in the Passion Play. These pictures are said to be marvelously accurate and life-like. They have never been shown as yet in any land, but those who have been fortunate enough to have a private view of them announce them most beautiful and impressive. Professor Ernest Lacy, of this city, has been engaged to give a descriptive lecture of these pictures and the entire entertainment lectures and pictures cover a space of time of about two hours.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, dimanche 7 novembre 1897, p. 3.

THE "PASSION PLAY" GIVEN HERE IN BOSTON.
SPLENDID REPRODUCTION DF THE IMPRESSIVE SPECTACLE.
Oberammergau and its Peasant Actors Vividly Shown at the Museum with the Aid of the Cinematograph-Not a Single Suggestion of lrreverence in the Whole Representation.
Prof. Ernest Lacy's famous reproduction of the Oberammergau "Passion Play" entered last night at the Boston Museum upon what promises to be one of the most successful fortnights ever devoted in this city to a popular theatrical entertainment. The augury of the occasion was a splendid audience, including in its numbers not only regular theatregoers, but a considerable contingent of people who are much oftener to be found at church than attending a play.
But beyond and above this attitude of the public was the complete rendering, without even the appearance of a hitch, given by performers who neither by love nor by money could have been induced to quit the Bohemian forests in the midst of which they annually represent the chief incidents in the life of Christ. The whole spectacle was a surprise to people unacquainted with the thaumaturgy of the cinematograph, and the interest grew more and more absorbing as the climax was approached. The audience was enthusiastic, and its applause unstinted.
The pictures thrown on the screen last night at the Museum had their origin some months ago in the thoughts of Dr. W.W. Freeman, alter witnessing a performance of the "Passion Play" in Horitz Bohemia, that possibly the peasant staking part might be induced to give a representation for use in the cinematograph. His scheme proved successful, and all last summer, as well as part of the previous winter, he spent at Horitz "taking" the various scenes in the play, as well as other pictures suited to reproduction.
The result is the fine exhibition given last night at the Museum, consisting of a complete set of moving pictures of the "Passion Play," with an explanatory lecture by Prof. Lacy and some excellent singing and instrumental music.
The representation, as could be seen at a glance, faithfully reproduced the scenes enacted annually by the peasants at Horitz. ln one very remarkable way the cinematographic method showed its advantage for a sacred play over both living figures and mere pictures in panorama. A machine like that used last night disposes forever of the objection of irreverence.
It is a tact that, through all the ages of the Christian era, men have loved to imagine the Godlike in the human; have ever sought to discover their conception of the divine beneath the earthly form of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet from any attempt to thus personate deity by means of an ordinary man, the sensitive religious conscience of modern times has always shrunk. It did this several times in Europe, and still more recently in the United States.
But, in the representation at the Museum, all ground of protest on this score is entirely removed. The great world drama is not acted in any true sense of the word nor does anybody, from one end of the lecture to the other, take upon himself the responsibility of suggesting in flesh and blood what Christ might have looked like when he was on earth. The startling incongruities by which Bible scenes have been so often degraded to the level of "living tableaux"; the rude touch of the stage realist from which the tender ideals of a delicate imagination come forth hope-lessly ruined-these have no part or place in the representation at the Museum. And if the disadvantages inseparable from the acting of the "Passion Play" have been avoided, the boldness, the inactivity, the "dead calm" of the picture are equally absent. What is given to the spectator is a union of the best features of the acted play, with its real personages in living relief, and of the lifelike reproduction which only the smooth surfaces of a photograph can ever be expected to yield.
The figures are always in motion, yet their "tone" is such as to obtrude the persona! element as little as possible. There is, moreover, an element of mystery inseparable from the manner in which they change on the screen, and though each figure represents an actual person, all seem idealized to an extent which harmonizes well with the character of the piece.
At first the spectator thinks of the pictures only as a representation of a representation-regards them in the light of an effort to show how the peasants at Horitz acted their "Passion Play." It therefore seems in order to attend to the way in which the effects are being produced to calculate the probable speed of the machine, and watch for the right focussing of the images. This one can do at one's ease while Prof. Lacy is sketching, in the style of a literary artist, the environs of Horitz, as such pictures as "The Village Street," "The Stone Cutters," "Peasants Working in the Fields" and "The Passions-Spielhaus" fall upon the screen.
But when the play begins there is a new mental attitude toward the representation. The thought that one is gazing at a mere pictorial representation seems to pass away, and in its place comes, somehow or other, the notion that the people seen are real people, and that on the screen there are moving the very men and women who acted the "Passion Play" last summer in the Bohemian forest to the delight of thousands of foreigners.
So it goes on for a while, as the spectators follow with increasing interest the various introductory pictures which present Old Testament incidents, such as "Adam and Eve in the Garden," "The Flood," "Moses in the Bulrushes" and "The Angels Appearing to Mary."
Then the players begin to depict the birth and life of Christ, and with this change of the subject there comes a new change of the mental attitude. So absorbing becomes the interest of the pictures that the onlooker, from merely regarding the figures as the figures of the real, live people who acted the play in Bohemia, begins to forget all about what was done in Bohemia and henceforth is lost in the thought that the faces and forms before him are the real people who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago, and with their own eyes witnessed the crucifixion of Christ.
This triumph of the representation is greatly aided by the splendid face and excellent acting of Jordan Willschko, the Christus of the play, and hardly less so by the vivid manner in which Prof. Lacy re-enforces the effect by his descriptions.

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Boston Herald, 4 janvier 1898, p. 6.