Abstract: Film ethics is an emerging discipline within the humanities pedigree. Taking the basic principles of ethics as the frame of reference, it adopts an integrated approach to interpreting the ethical significance of the narrative style and content of a film from the perspectives of film narrative, film psychology, film sociology and film history. As a cross-disciplinary theory, film ethics takes narrative texts of images as the research object, ethical thoughts expressed in films as the main research content, and humanistic spirit of arts as the evaluation benchmark. While being committed to creating a theoretical interpretation tool suitable for image language, it also brings the tool into the overall research paradigm of film theory that coexists with other film disciplines. Apart from the above-mentioned basic characteristics, Chinese film ethics also places special emphasis on embedding the ethical thoughts from fine traditional Chinese culture into the film evaluation system, thus promoting the prosperity and development of Chinese films in both theoretical and practical senses. 

Key words: cinematography, ethics, image ethics, disciplinary system