Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

Ralph Potter, another member of the club of Egypt's lovers, is an American journalist, broadcaster and writer, whose contributions have appeared in a number of leading newspapers and magazines. His interest in Egypt was not new, he says. He has always been an avid reader of ancient Egyptian history. But since his first visit to Egypt he has become interested in modern aspects of Egyptian life and has written and broadcast about tourism in Egypt, about the restoration of the sphinx, about the Egyptian film industries and many other topics.

When Ralph Potter writes, he writes in depth and only after a thorough study of the subject he is writing about. I remember when, during one of his visits, he wanted to write about problems of tourism at a time when there was only a trickle of foreign tourists coming to Egypt in the middle of the 1991 Gulf war. Having collected all the material in official and travel companies' publications, he took a Nile cruise from Luxor to Aswan. he wrote his impressions, both in an American newspaper and the Egyptian Gazette.

In his article he deplored the absence of tourists and criticised the American attitude in particular based on claims of security. He stressed the prevalence of security in Egypt, comparing it with the crimes committed in New York, and how one day's crime in New York is probably a whole year's cases in Egypt. He called upon Americans to do like the Germans who did not stop flocking into the country.

When Potter wanted to write about the film industry he made a round of Egyptian studios, met leading film people, producers, directors, actors, actresses and high-ranking officials in the Ministry of Culture. Besides he saw a number of films, and from the material he had gathered and the reports he had read he produced a long essay which can be a guide to anyone who wants facts about the Egyptian cinema.

Potter gave the history of the industry from the time Mohamed Karim came back from Paris, until the present. He discussed Youssef Chahine's film Cairo Station and his development as a film maker until his films about Alexandria and Cairo and the controversy over the latter. He tried to explore the reasons behind the slow development of the industry, bearing in mind that in the thirties it could stand on a par with Western cinema, then it stood still, or at least did not develop at the anticipated rate.

Potter then discussed the role of the Government and the problems which stand in the way of the healthy development of the industry: bureaucracy, censorship and deterioration of the equipment.

In another article, he deals with the problem of the sphinx. In a royal style he says that within each era, a creative human being strives for his or her life's work to last for all eternity. This, of course, is not possible unless science can come up with some magic potion that can defy the forces of nature. In the case of the 4500 year old Great Sphinx, some of us mistakenly believe this sculptural wonder can, indeed, last forever. Unfortunately, there are 20th Century troubles at the site of the 'Guardian of the Valley of the Nile'.

The Great Sphinx in Giza, is now faced with radical changes, repelling many artists, or complete erosion, which shocks many more artists as well as scientists. Deterioration, due to floods, wind and sandstorms, and, not least of all, man's attempts at preserving and restoring various parts of this sculptural phenomenon, have and still is threatening its very existence. In a sense, Potter says, the Sphinx is as much an endangered species as the African elephant.

The important question raised by Western and Egyptian scholars of art, namely can the sphinx survive the ravages of man and nature, has never been fully answered to the satisfaction of archeologists and Egyptologists until recently. The Egyptian Antiquities Organisation embarked upon a series of restoration projects which started in 1982 and continues to the present day.

In his writings, Potter explained that for any restoration project to be comprehensive three major steps -- excluding the actual masonry construction -- must be addressed. First, the level of the underground water with a high saline content must be reduced. Second, all existing tar roads must be replaced with firm sand tracks, thus eliminating heavy vehicular traffic which currently shower the Sphinx with exhaust fumes. Third, the sewer system surrounding the Sphinx area must be modernised.

The pertinence of the monuments of the earliest Pharaohs to human history has been emphasised time and again by many westerners. Three Columbia University professors -- Everard M Upjohn, Pauls Wingert and Jane Gaston Mahler -- wrote, "Art is the response to a fundamental human demand, its primary purpose is to add to the interpretation and completeness of life. Our Western tradition in the history of art, it appears, begins in Egypt."

Andre Malraux, in his brilliant The Metamorphosis of the Gods wrote in 1960, "That for many thousand years art's function was to depict the gods ... By a paradox of history it was left to the first agnostic culture that the world has known, when it resuscitated all other cultures, to recall to life their sacred works...We have glimpses of that enigmatic power which unites for us, as living actualities, the statues of the earliest Pharaohs..."