Reanimated Dog Head Experiment (2010)

        There is a really disturbing and insanely creepy educational film made in the 30s or 40s about the experiments on revival in the Soviet Union that were done with dogs. I found it on archive.org a few weeks ago because I was editing the stuff in Conversations with T.F. Mou about Unit 731 and I needed "coverage" of experimental laboratories and doctors' hands doing sinister looking things. The scene where they keep a dog's head separate from its body really sickened me in particular so I did sort of a surrealistic sketch of the creepiest bit to "get it out of my system", where they put citric acid on the disembodied doggie's mouth which gets it to lick its face. I wonder if Tim Burton saw that film before he made Frankenweenie. And think of how many times those doctors must have botched that experiment before they got it right, it's kind of horrible to think of this, but integrity vs. progress will always be an issue with science, I think. Probably a lot of the technological advances we take for granted today exist because we killed some animal to test it first (and human experimentation to boot). Disturbingly enough, with scientific progress, it seems like the "you gotta break a few eggs" argument is not without its validity. Sadly I don't think there's any "right answer" to moral dilemmas such as these.

 Copyright J.L. Carrozza, 2001-2010.