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Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 Soviet science film, shot at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy in Moscow. Its subject is Sergei Brukhonenko's autojektor, an early heart-lung machine: two pumps and an oxygen reservoir that could do the work of a heart and lungs outside the body. The English version opens with the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane on camera, vouching for it: "I have seen some of the experiments shown in this film actually carried out" (00:58).

The film builds up in steps. First a dog's heart beats in a tray, fed with blood through tubes. Then a pair of lungs breathes on a bellows. Then a dog's head, kept alive on the machine, which the narrator says "lives on for hours and reacts to external stimuli" (05:39). Then the main event: a dog is drained of its blood until its heart stops. "Ten minutes have elapsed since the animal died" (14:00), and the autojektor pumps the blood back in. The heart flutters, restarts, the dog breathes, and the machine is disconnected.

The ending is a roll call of survivors. One dog was revived "after 15 minutes of death" (18:52); another is "the offspring of revived parents." The film says the revived dogs "live for years, they grow, they put on weight, and have families."

How much of it is a straight record is still argued. The experiments themselves are generally accepted as real, and Brukhonenko had shown the machine keeping a dog's head alive at a Moscow congress in 1925. But some commentators suggest the film re-stages them, and some scientists who saw the head experiment said it lived minutes, not hours. The film was screened in London in 1942 and to about a thousand American scientists in New York the next year, as the Second World War made the Soviet Union an ally.