Few old science films have had a stranger afterlife than Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. Made in the Soviet Union in 1940, it shows a dog’s isolated head responding to light and sound while connected to a pump, then a dog apparently brought back after its blood is drained. It circulates online today as Cold War horror, often with a wrong date and a wrong label as a military experiment.
What it actually was
The film documents the work of Soviet physiologist Sergei Brukhonenko, who built a device he called the autojektor, an early machine for pumping and oxygenating blood outside the body. Brukhonenko’s research team used it in animal experiments through the 1920s and 1930s. The English-language version of the film opens with an introduction by the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, and it was screened for American scientists during the Second World War, when the Soviet Union was an ally.
How much of it is real
Historians who have looked closely at the film believe some of what it shows is a reenactment rather than live footage of a single experiment, and some sequences may have been staged for the camera. That is not unusual for science films of the era, which often recreated work for clarity. The underlying research, on keeping tissue alive with an artificial circulation, was genuine and was published.
Why it matters
The film is difficult to watch, and the treatment of the animals would not be accepted in most labs today. But the problem Brukhonenko was working on was a serious one. Heart-lung machines that take over circulation during surgery became practical in the 1950s, opening the way for open-heart operations. Brukhonenko’s autojektor is regularly cited as one of the early devices in that line.
Seen that way, the film is less a horror short than a rough, unsettling record of medicine feeling its way toward something that now saves lives every day.
Sources: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms and Sergei Brukhonenko, Wikipedia; Heart–lung machine, Wikipedia.
