Womanist Films

The last film I saw with a black female character in it was Monsters Ball, and I do have to say that I absolutely agree with Reid's perception that Halle Berry appears like a desired sexualized object (p.100). It might be true that, as Reid states, there are several movies, for example How Stella got her groove back or Waiting to exhale, where black female characters are comparable to white characters on screen both in intelligence and social status. But overall, a lot of the black characters, and not only the ones Whoopi Goldberg played often throughout her career, are still modeled after the old black screen stereotypes. In fact, when I watched the scene in Monsters Ball where the two main characters are about to have sex, the way Halle Berry's character approached Thornton's character reminded me a ittle bit of The Birth of a Nation, there is a scene where a black character, clearly the jezebel stereotype, approaches a white character in a similar manner.