[3] Following the lung scene, the audience is then shown the autojektor, a heart-lung machine, composed of a pair of linear diaphragm pumps, venous and arterial, exchanging oxygen with a water reservoir.

Finally, a dog is brought to clinical death (depicted primarily through an animated diagram of lung and heart activity) by draining the blood from its body, triggering cardiac arrest.

[3][4] According to the film, several dogs were brought back to life using this method, including one which is the offspring of two parents who were also resuscitated using the machine.

[5] In 1925, Sergei Brukhonenko demonstrated the autojektor to the Second Congress of Russian Pathologists in Moscow, where the device kept a dog's head alive for an hour and 40 minutes, while it displayed various reflexes.

[1] It was one of three Soviet documentary films that Haldane was requested to supply commentary for in July 1942; the originally proposed English title was Experiments in Bringing the Dead to Life.

[1] The film was shown in London towards the end of 1942, and then to an audience of a thousand US scientists the next year in New York,[1] at the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship.

[4] George Bernard Shaw wrote of Brukhonenko's decapitation experiment: "I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.

[12] Another source of skepticism are the dogs drained of blood and then brought back to life, as after 10 minutes of death they should have experienced serious brain damage.