The opening images of Persona prepare us for the exploratory, inchoate nature of the film. In the flickering half light of a projector, we see film leader catch onto the groove of a reel, and the first part of the montage that ensues – clips from a cartoon, a silent comedy, a nature film, and so on – suggests a child's introduction to the varieties of moviemaking. Eventually we see that child, emerging from the sleep where perhaps he dreamed those images. He reaches out his hand and touches a blurry projection that crystallizes, magically, into Liv Ullmann's face. It has been often assumed that the child is Ingmar Bergman, and that the frame around the narrative of Persona – which concludes as the film winding around that reel abruptly runs out – addresses his own godlike role as a film director: when the child touches the projected light in wonder, he mimics Michelangelo's God extending life to Adam. And Bergman's self-consciousness about creating film is sustained throughout Persona, even though the film-within-a-film imagery passes quickly out of the movie, recurring only briefly and much later on. For the rest of the picture, Bergman addresses this issue through the related theme of performance, which his collaboration with his two stars, Ullmann (who plays an actress, Elisabet Vogler) and Bibi Andersson, brings into focus.

Bergman fell in love with the theater at the age of 9 and built a toy stage to express that love; he began as an actor and director in the Swedish theater and returned to it many times during his career before allowing it to eclipse his film work completely in the early 1980s.