Primal Scenes (1980)

Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and sexuality. Primal Scenes is an excellent example of women’s erotica, focusing on a woman’s experience of her body as both sexually powerful and deeply mysterious. Montano uses stirring images of women acting in the rather traditional roles of nun and mother, yet she recasts these roles and demonstrates, from a woman’s point of view, the possibility of claiming a fully-realized sexual intensity for women.